• "Does the Internet Matter?": That's the title of a new report out from Temple University's Institute for Business and Information Technology. Making use of some techPresident data, Temple's Sunil Wattal, David Schuff, and Munir Mandviwalla considered how social media in particular shaped the '08 presidential primaries. Their conclusion? While YouTube and MySpace may help lesser-known candidates find footing, only blogs seem to correlate with boosts in Gallup poll numbers. ( You might notice that the report requires a password, but we've got one for you: "templeowls.")

• The Long Campaign's Lessons for Non-Profits: Over on NetSquared's Think Tank blog, Amy Sample Ward has been gathering thoughts from her fellow non-profiteers on what good thinking their organizations can glean from the 2008 election. The answers include speaking to young voters/supporters in their own language to striving to remain authentic. The post raises a provocative question, though: did the Obama campaign play it so safe that it missed the opportunity to trade mud-slinging for ideas?

• Should Obama Be Relying on YouTube?: The Obama-Biden transition team is offering an early peek at this weekend's video address, this one on the topic of Thanksgiving. But CNet Blog Network privacy expert Chris Soghoian is adamant that "it is simply improper to rely on YouTube to foot the bandwidth bill" for these addresses. (Thanks, Shaun Dakin.) To be fair, the transition team is also making use of Yahoo! Video, but most people watching these spots are doing it through YouTube. And, Soghoian says, that video service's user tracking and other privacy practices make it the wrong partner for the President-elect.

• The Promise and Peril of a Wired White House: Both Karl Rove and Joe Trippi share their take on what a wired White House might mean, in Cox News' David Ho's good look at how the web might shake up Washington. Rove suggests that lawmakers will be "livid if the White House facilitates" grassroots lobbying, while Trippi suggests that online organizing might leave legislators between a rock and a hard place. Trippi: "The rock is Barack Obama and the hard place is millions of Americans who are going to be pounding on them, calling them, e-mailing and knocking on their district office doors."

• Register Your Favorites in the Mashable Awards: The Mashable Open Web Awards are happening now, and some sites you might know are up for recognition. In the politics category, familiar names include legislative tracker GovTrack and news hub Huffington Post. And in the non-profit space, there's the do-not-contact registry Stop Political Calls and microloan site Kiva.org. Voting ends Wednesday.

• A Gift from Us to You: Hey, on this Friday after Thanksgiving, we offer up something we're truly thankful for: this adorable video of a kitten "driving" a Roomba. Awww...

In Case You Missed It...

Taking a look at Change.gov's ongoing discussion on health care that has attracted more than 2,800 comments, Allison Fine critiques the transition site as "a wiki wannabe." What she really doesn't like, says Allison, is that the effort is "so close to being something so much better."

And Nancy Scola dives in to Project Masiluleke, a South African experiment in mobile activism that is connecting those in KwaZulu-Natal province with HIV/AIDS lifelines.