The Web on the Candidates

• Attendees at Netroots Nation picked out a somewhat different set of priorities for themselves than they did for the next president, according to a straw poll from the Campaign for America's Future. Topping the concerns of respondents were 1) energy and global warming, 2) the gap between rich and poor, and 3) constitutional rights. But as to the issues picked as the most pressing for the next POTUS, while energy and global warming stayed at #2, the war in Iraq was in the first slot and health care in the third. One interpretation: energy is on everyone's minds, and some issues are seen as best tackled from the Oval Office. The poll, which captured the answers of a self-selected 13% of conference attendees offered another nugget: while 40% of respondents describe themselves as "liberal," 47% identify as "progressive." There was not a single person who called themselves "conservative;" they musta missed Bob Barr.

• Democratic congressional staffer Justin Hamilton articulates a thought bouncing around the Internets: Netroots Nation was a great opportunity to meet-and-greet and share some big ideas, with less of a focus on action items and next steps. Justin: "[W]hat an architect has that a pundit doesn't is a blueprint. That's what I felt was the missing link in Austin." Also give a read to Washingtonian's Garrett Graff's excellent conference recap, "Netroots Nation: When Outsiders Become Insiders." (An NN sidenote: conference organizers are using Get Satisfaction to track the response to the event.)

• CIO Insight's Ed Cone interviews the Next Right's Jon Henke. Jon explains how the conservative hub seeks to tap into the web's love of insurgencies and write the story of modern conservativism. And the Washington Post Style section interviews Robert Bluey, Mindy Finn, Matt Lewis, David All on being young, conservative new-media pioneers in Washington DC -- which doesn't seem to be as small or marginal a group of folks as it once was.

• Peter Leyden is a quintessential new media/new tech guy. The former managing editor of Wired and the newly ex-director of the New Politics Institute, he has left that latter post to take advantage of what he's calling The Obama Moment. Pete: "I think there are ways to meld the best elements of the old think tank world with the new capabilities of the tech world to help transform the ideas business in DC." Pete's not alone. Fellow Silicon Valleyite (at least part time) Joe Trippi tells the aforementioned Wired that we're witnessing "an Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now."

The Candidates on the Web

• John McCain is not at all normal, reports the AP. Three-quarters of white, college-educated men of his age bracket in the U.S. use the Internet. But no worries. Comedian Andy Borowitz reports that the Republican candidate is busy planning his first visit to the Google, the Amazon, and other exotic online destinations.

TechCongress and Beyond

• After a round of settlement talks, The Republican National Committee and online print shop Cafe Press have reached an agreement over the use the GOP elephant. The vender has pledged to lean on its customers who use the logo without putting their own spin on it.

• Making use of the Twitter stats tool Twist, Internet analyst William Beutler finds that Netroots Nation generated far more tweet chatter than RightOnline, but both were swamped by the great deal of noise that came out of Personal Democracy Forum '08, which attracted a tech-experienced crowd from both the right and left.

John McCain | Netroots Nation | RightOnline | RNC | Twitter
Nancy Scola's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati