Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama, The New York Times.

Mr. Sanilevich said the Netanyahu campaign plans to make use of Twitter, the mass text-messaging service that sends out short “tweets.

“There are a couple thousand in Israel on Twitter,” he said. “We have lots of people using the Web sites registered as volunteers, and I am sure we will be able to use Twitter, which is an amazing tool. I have it on my phone, and I go around with Bibi and everywhere we go he gives me things to say on Twitter.”

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs, The New York Times.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

A New Voice Rises In the Red States, NewsWeek.

After suffering demoralizing losses in the Nov. 4 election, the GOP is searching for new voices to spur a comeback. But the party's right wing tends to distrust anyone who's too comfortable inside the Beltway, which is partly why Erickson—White House visits aside—has built such a following. The worldwide headquarters of his RedState.com is a sleepy coffee shop in Macon, Ga., 700 miles from Washington. They must brew a strong cup of joe there, because from his remote perch, Erickson has grabbed his party's power brokers by their elephant-stitched suspenders.

Youth vote edges up 1 percentage point, Politico.

"Everybody voted at a higher rate," said Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE. "It was a big year for everyone else to turn out as well."Levine said he thought the youth made a good showing, though."The youth vote was pretty high in 2004," Levine said. "It's hard to improve that much over it.

Can Facebook be Presidential, Politico.

With the campaign over, though, the president-elect is in uncharted territory. He has figured out how to use the Web in order to get elected. Now he must determine how the Internet can aid in governing.So how should the president-elect craft a plan for the Web?The process won't be easy. One problem is that campaign finance rules likely keep the president-elect from simply keeping my.barackobama.com.

Twitterank Creator Speaks, ZDNet.

That, is the “secwet” behind Twitterank. Similar to how Google’s PageRank algorithm judged a web page based on the number of inbound links and the origin of those links, Twitterank attempts to quantify a Twitter user by analyzing their incoming @replies. In essence, the more people talk to you, the higher your score.

Chatting about the Internet and the 2008 Elections, The Bivings Report.

The secret of the success of Barack Obama’s social network is that at its heart it is really a social action center.  When you login to My.BarackObama, you are pushed to make phone calls to undecided voters, knock on doors and raise money for the campaign, not to produce content.

Web sites foretell a YouTube presidency, Washington Times.

“There's no doubt this is going to be more of a YouTube presidency than a fireside chat presidency," he said. "President Obama will be reinventing the relationship between the president and the American people using these new tools."

Mr. Obama will inherit a Web operation that has improved over the years but is sterile - a press release clearinghouse with no blog and which shares little in common with the vibrant graphics- and video-heavy BarackObama.com that attracted millions of supporters.

Tech makes this the year of the youth vote, NextGov.

McCain's campaign did not respond to an interview request, and the Republican National Committee simply provided a list of websites that it believes illustrate its youth outreach, including MyGOP.com, the RNC's social network, which allows users to create an account to learn about volunteer opportunities. The site, which went live in January, is the party's answer to MyBarackObama.com.

But some Republicans have quietly expressed concern that the Left is innovating faster than the Right -- producing a gap that could prove costly now and in future elections. Obama, they say, hasn't just created a social-networking chat frenzy. He has built a database of e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers that could help his party keep younger voters in the Democratic fold for years to come.

What Next for Obama's Text-Messaging Database?, Washington Post. 

Still, alongside YouTube and Facebook, texting is one of the big X factors of this presidential campaign. Sen. John McCain doesn't have a text program, though the National College Republican Committee, which is campaigning for him, is experimenting with texting at various schools.

Salesforce.com Wants to Host Your Web Site, Wall Street Journal

This isn’t your run of the mill Web-site support, however. The goal is to bridge the divide that exists in many businesses between Web operations and internal information technology, says Francis. Not only are the two often run by different groups, but more importantly data doesn’t always move freely between the Web site and a business’s systems.

Briefing 2.0: Breaking Through 20th Century Walls, DIPNote.

Projecting forward, I suspect future administrations will build on our efforts. Of course, it will be up to them whether to eliminate, modify, or leave the same what we are doing. You will also have a say as to how the relationship develops. But I further suspect that the changes we have set in motion, which are as much about what you see as they are about changes in State Department processes, will only accelerate in the years ahead.

Sarkozy Describes Obama's Approach on Iran as "Utterly Immature", The Hedgehog Blog.  

Is this the same Obama who is supposedly going to restore American standing in Europe? Were the implications not so serious, one might engage in some Schadenfreude at the thought that European leaders will reap what they have sown by not more publicly supporting the Bush Administration in recent years.

Obama: Supreme Court should redistribute wealth, The Conservative Revolution. 

In a 2001 interview with Chicago Public Radio, Barack Obama argued that the Supreme Court should have redistributed wealth as part of Civil Rights reforms. He laments the fact that the founding fathers placed restraints on the courts to advance “economic justice.” Obama doesn’t think the Warren Court was radical enough, and says “redistributive change” would have to be accomplished through legislative means.

Study: Sequoia e-voting machines disturbingly easy to hack, ars technica.

The study was commissioned by the state of New Jersey following a lawsuit brought against the state by public-interest groups. The suit alleged that the voting machines failed to meet the standards set by New Jersey law, which requires election official to ensure that all votes are fairly counted. Critics contend that Sequoia's direct-recording electronic (DRE) machine can't be trusted because it doesn't generate a paper trail for auditing. The suit dismissed and then appealed in 2005, but was put on hold when the state legislature passed a law that would require voting machines to emit paper records by 2008.

iPhones Being Tested for Use by Congress, Cult of Mac.

RIM’s Blacberry handhelds have been the communicator of choice in Washington since 2001 and today nearly 8,200 rely on a dedicated Blackberry exchange server to deliver email to people affiliated with the House of Representatives. “We’re trying [iPhones] out … because we heard a lot of people wanted the option to have them,” said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the CAO.

US military targets social nets, The Guardian.

SRI International based in Menlo Park, California, teamed up with military officers to build a new social analytics tool called iLink that generates models and helps streamline the process by which a specific expert in an online community can be found.

In simple terms, iLink is a machine learning-based system that models users and content in a social network and then points the user to relevant content.