McCain is slow to gain young voters, Politico.

Recent polling suggests McCain faces an uphill battle with young voters. Most matchups show him trailing his Democratic rivals. An April 21 MTV survey of 18-to-29-year-old voters showed Obama beating McCain 52 percent to 39 percent, while Clinton led McCain 51 percent to 41 percent. An April 25 survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics showed Obama beating McCain among 18-to-24-year-olds, 50 percent to 29 percent; Clinton beat McCain 41 percent to 34 percent with the same age group.

Survey: One-fifth of Americans have never used e-mail, CNET.

About 20 percent of all U.S. heads-of-household have never sent an e-mail, and about 20 million households, or 18 percent, are without Internet access, according to a study released earlier this week.

...

Just 7 percent of the 20 million households without Internet access indicated during the survey that they plan to subscribe to an Internet service within the next 12 months. However, the study noted a steady decline in the number of disconnected households when comparing findings with previous years; the 2006 survey found that 31 million households, or 29 percent, of all U.S. households were without Internet access.

Estimates Online Advertising from Political Campaigns and Advocacy Groups Will Reach $50 Million This Year, ResearchandMarkets.com.

This year's national and local elections are generating record advertising spending, including online. Still, only 1% to 2% of political ad budgets will be spent online, compared with 50% to 80% on broadcast TV advertising.

via e.politics

Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt, Washington Post.

Since late March, 74,000 people had registered on a Facebook page created and run by Maher and a few other young Egyptians, most of them newcomers to activism. Even some of Egypt's older, more disillusioned proponents of democracy had let themselves hope that a social networking Web site created by American college students could become an electronic rallying point for protest against President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule.

But the experience of the Facebook activists showed the limits of technology as a means of organizing dissent against a repressive government. Maher would end up among what rights groups said were 500 Egyptians arrested during two months of political activism in Egypt -- and find himself stripped and beaten in a Cairo police station, he said.

In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, May 4, the day of a planned strike, the failure of his Facebook movement was only just becoming clear. Maher and other organizers worked to prop up the spirits of their supporters. We've got to do something, Maher insisted online.

China allows bloggers, others to spread quake news, AP.

Government officials held a rare, real-time online exchange with ordinary Chinese on Friday to answer angry questions about why so many schools collapsed in the quake.

"They understand better now that to react slowly or to cover up in the Internet age is a bad idea," Xiao said in a telephone interview.

But the government is still monitoring the online conversation. Seventeen people have been detained since the earthquake, warned or forced to write apologies for online messages that "spread false information, made sensational statements and sapped public confidence," the state-run news agency, Xinhua, reported Thursday.