Special thanks to Jordan for stepping in on Friday and blogging the news to the people while I was out sick. It's good to have a team behind you.

Obama's failed text-message ploy, The Guardian.

Indeed, less than two weeks ago, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe assured supporters that they would be the first to know who Obama chose for his VP – via text. I worked for John Kerry in 2004, and we announced the John Edwards VP pick to our supporters via email, then the grassroots technology du jour. We were scooped by the press, but not by much. The emails were cycling through the queue on a Tuesday in July. It felt like a victory for the millions of grassroots, online supporters, although I don't think it was ever recognised as such.

On the blog TechPresident, Republican strategist David All summed up the Obama text effort in one word: "Disappointing."

Yes, the mainstream media scooped the netroots again this time around.

New C-SPAN Sites Get Way Unboring With YouTube, Twitter, Qik, Flash…, TechCrunch.

But today C-SPAN gets fairly cool with the launch of two new sites dedicated to the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver and Republican Convention in Minneapolis. C-Span is still workingout some technical issues, but TechCrunch readers can get an early preview by clicking on these links for DNC08 and RNC08. Both are similarly formatted sites that incorporate citizen journalism via blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Qik into portals to cover convention and related news. They will complement the existing C-SPAN Politics site.

The sites also incorporate normal C-SPAN video content. But unlike the unwieldy content on the main C-SPAN site the new sites will show video in Flash format and allow embedding on other sites. Third party blog content from sites like Huffington Post, Instapundit, Gateway Pundit, RedState, etc. will be incorporated into the site and Twitter messages marked with hash marks #RNC08 or #DNC08 will also appear on the site (with moderation). C-SPAN employees will be given Qik cameras to record the action when not on main camera.

McCain up 5 points, increasing youth support, CR Voice.

Also interesting is that the poll shows that Obama’s lead among young voters age 18-29 slipped 12 points from July. His lead among our age demographic is now only 12 points, 52-40. This is the second major poll that has shown Obama losing his grip on this group of voters.

Where Politics Reigns, So Do Political Blogs, NY Times.

Then, there is CWA-NJ Conservatives with Attitude! (www.gopusanj.com). The counterpoint to Blue New Jersey, CWA bills itself as the home for “home-grown, rock-ribbed, All-American patriots.” The site offers new posts on most days, with supportive fans largely echoing the authors’ sentiments.

Obama's Wide Web: From YouTube to Text Messaging, Candidate's Team Connects to Voters, Washington Post.

The launch began in early 2007, when Joe Rospars, a veteran of the Dean campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was hired as new-media director. In the following weeks, the 27-year-old assembled a group that included one of the co-founders of Facebook, an award-winning CNN producer and a text-messaging enthusiast. BarackObama.com was born.

A year and a half ago, Rospars led a group of 11. It's easily double that now, with staffers taping signs on the back of their furniture that read, "This is not an extra chair! This chair belongs to . . ." Rospars won't divulge the total number of people in his team. "We don't want to give away our entire playbook," he says.

What Makes for a Good Blog?, 43Folders.

# Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?

# Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

The Politics of Digg: Understanding the complex network that drives stories to the front page, Bloggasm.

As the site grew increasingly popular, it became the target of more and more users who wanted to game the system; entire companies sprouted up offering to promote stories for money and homogenized groups worked together to promote their own agendas and content. The site administrators eventually rolled out new algorithms that necessitated a “diversity” of votes to make it harder for a group of 50 or so malicious Diggers to hijack the site for its own purposes.

...

As many relayed to me over the past few days, it’s a game that takes a good bit of persistence and an abundance of spare time. And, because of a lack of transparency from Digg employees, there has been a growing tide of conspiracy theories about this group and others, claims of “bury brigades” and secret cabals of editors that comb through upcoming categories, bashing down any links that don’t promote a particular viewpoint or bias.

In the past week I’ve conducted phone and email interviews with over 50 of Digg’s top users in an attempt to piece together the cohesive links and strategies that make them so successful. It was during these discussions that I discovered that these Diggers are much more than a team of link pushers and self-marketers; many of their conversations have later developed into real-world friendships.

Google Plans Big Presence at Summer Political Conventions, Wired.

To that end, Google plans on having a large presence at both the conventions. Delegates, reporters and bloggers will be able to use computers to upload their photos and videos to the web. The company says that it also plans on offering free smoothies and massages.

Google staffers gave presentations on some of the projects that its teams have been working on on Monday. In addition to the Google Power Reader in Politics project, the company also showcased its political video search tool, which it rolled out in July.

Company staffers also provided a preview of a project that will enable people to look up their voting registration status, voting precinct location and ballot information online. During the primaries, one of the most consistently searched-for terms on election days was voter precinct location information. Google is working with the Pew Center's Electionline.org to launch the project this fall. The company plans on demonstrating an example of its collaborative efforts with the Ohio Secretary of State at the convention.

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.