McCain Vows To Court Young Voters, NPR.

John McCain sees young voters as a competitive demographic this year," said McCain youth outreach spokesman Joe Pounder, "and we're going to go after them."

To do that, the McCain campaign says it will focus on his legacy as a war hero, plus appearances on late night television shows — including Saturday Night Live — and town hall meetings around the country. He also has an army of thousands of young volunteers, thanks to Young Republican and College Republican clubs around the country connecting with peers over the phone and through canvas drives.

In Technology Tools, Obama Given Edge Over McCain Team, Investor's Business Daily.

Demographics contribute to Obama's online edge. The Pew Internet & American Life Project said in a report last month that Democrats simply have a larger proportion of young activists who use online campaign tools.

"Younger online political users tilt in favor of the Democrats in general and Obama in particular," the report said. It adds that young Republicans use tools like online video at similar rates as young Democrats, but they make up a smaller slice of their party overall.

The two campaigns' Internet efforts also might partly reflect each candidate's tech savvy. McCain, 71, drew flak earlier this year for telling a reporter that he's a computer illiterate who "has to rely on my wife for all of the help that I can get."

He has since said he's "becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need." But he has said that he doesn't e-mail and doesn't own a BlackBerry smart phone, though he does use his aides' BlackBerrys.

…What you can Do on Digg, Ft. Hard Knox.

So, you’re one of the brave conservatives who has decided to face the Digg Monster head-on. Now what? Following are some lessons we’ve learned the hard way. I hope you’ll be able to use them to improve your own Digg experience.

1. First, you’ll need a Digg ID. For security and privacy reasons, you’ll need to choose a name that is not related to your real name, your blog, your place of business, your usual online profile, or your residence. Plus, if you’ll look through the UserID’s for the other Diggers, you’ll see that catchy, weirdly-spelled online nicknames are “cool” (and we all want to be “cool”).
2. Do not immediately begin “friending” or becoming a “fan” of all of the conservatives you find on Digg. Digg has this thing called the “algorithm.” It’s basically a way for the Digg administrators to manipulate the content of the front page to please their investors, while pretending that all of the content is there because of the “democratic voting process.” This algorithm discounts votes for Diggs between friends.

You Choose Spotlight: Franken and Coleman, CitizenTube.

With so many hot congressional and senatorial races in this years
election, today we're re-launching our You Choose '08 Spotlight series
to give you access to candidates running in States across the country.

First up, the U.S. senatorial race between Senator Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

Both Coleman and Franken have agreed to answer video questions from
YouTube users, which can be submitted as responses to this call-out video:

Iraqi Bloggers on Obama's Trip, GroundGame.

A pair of Iraqi bloggers have weighed in on the trip as well. Omar and Mohammed Fadhil say Obama is basing his travels on electoral politics and is benefiting from Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki being in a campaign fight of his own:

This visit, for Obama, is just a necessary evil -- part of an electoral campaign and not a sincere fact-finding mission. The fact that Obama made Afghanistan his first stop (after arriving in Kuwait, just next door to Iraq) suggests that it's his electoral campaign that sets his priorities when it comes to the war on terrorism, not the actual map and course of the war.

The Talisman Gate blog also weighs in on the trip, saying Obama needs to better explain his goals for the country and the larger Middle East region.

'Mommybloggers' turn their hobby into profits, San Francisco Chronicle.

Mommyblogging - a term embraced by some and reviled by others - has become one of the more lucrative blog categories because of marketers' intense desire to connect with mothers, who are leaving traditional advertising venues such as soap operas for the Internet, said BlogHer co-founder Jory Des Jardins.

"When you have children in the household, your spending goes through the roof," said Charlene Li, who covered social media for Forrester Research before leaving to strike out on her own recently. Pair that with the fact that mothers are more likely to blog than the general Internet population - 15 percent of mothers with kids under 18 blog, compared with 12 percent of all online adults, Li said - and mommybloggers begin to look pretty attractive to anyone selling anything.