While many in the wired political world focus (ok, obsess!) about every minor nav change and bland video posted to President-elect Obama's still-evolving Change.gov transition site, what about another growing nexus of Democratic power in Washington?

Couldn't Nancy Pelosi - at least in theory - out-change the Change.gov President? And wouldn't an open and more robust Speaker.gov be good for democracy?

Now that the details are slooowly creeping out and we have a clearer idea of the Obama election team's online numbers, what conclusions can we draw for the future? Right off the bat, Jose Antonio Vargas's recent piece in the Post suggests something critical: online communications campaigns should consider offering supporters tiers of potential engagement.

Matthew Burton posted yesterday on the Daschle health care video over at Change.gov. His question?

Is this video something that we tech-politics geeks should be excited about?

Honestly, if the subject was just the clip I would answer with a resounding no. I don't think the video itself was anything terribly interesting or revolutionary.

However, Greg Elin over at the Sunlight Foundation has sort of a different perspective that gives the effort a bit more meaning for me.

Change.gov the website is so yesterday. Today, it's Change.gov the widget, iPhone app, and mobile tool.

We noted a few days ago that online home of the Obama-Biden Transition Project had swapped out traditional copyright for a far looser Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license -- one that invites users to have their way with the site's contents, as long as they give credit back to Obama. Now a new service called Cerado Ventana has packaged Change.gov in a way that makes it easier to interact with the site through other portals.

Back in the day, when Yahoo! was the only search game in town, many wondered why Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), and eventually Google would attempt to break into that market. The answer continues to be the same - although they're good, there's still a lot to be done with Search. Contextual search is still being explored, and in terms of government and campaign information, most documents are not publicly or easily available to the search engines. With the goal of open government in mind, I decided to take a look at five relatively new search companies that recently launched sites, hoping that perhaps some of them could help make search of government and campaign data a little better, honing in on the FEC, OMB and more.

(Reposted from ClickZ)

Barack Obama and John McCain duked it out till the very end online, with ads that went after specific audiences in important swing states. Sites across the Web were drowned in hundreds of millions of Obama's voter registration and state-targeted early voting ads in the final weeks. Meanwhile, the McCain camp attacked, asked for cash, and played the Palin card in display ads more focused on persuading voters than the campaign's earlier ads had been. Joe the Plumber made an appearance, too, of course.

It was the sweltering late summer, 2007, in Washington DC. The House of Representatives was smack in the middle of debate over the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And members of Congress, expected to render judgment on legislation that would fundamentally impact core America rights, hadn't laid eyes upon the latest copy of the bill. It's "just absolute lunacy," said California Republican David Dreir of the situation at the time...On the point above, one of the fundamental questions of our time is this: how do we use all the government information the Internet might set free for public good? An open debate over that question is now taking place on the Google Group of the Sunlight Foundation's nascent Open Senate Project...The latest email from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe announcing the selection of the incoming administration's national security and foreign policy team includes a big ol' red button asking for contributions...and much more.

A week ago, the Obama-Biden transition team solicited ideas for improving health care. Today, the team responded to our comments with a video from Tom Daschle (recently nominated for Secretary of Health & Human Services) and Lauren Aronson.

Is this video something that we tech-politics geeks should be excited about? I'm cautiously optimistic.

Overnight, a new site went up detailing a push by Stanford professor Larry Lessig to petition the Obama-Biden transition to abide by not only the letter of open government principles, but the spirit...California-based David Kralik heads up internet strategy for Newt Gingrich's American Solutions organization, and he's out with a look in the DC Examiner at how America's first CTO -- what he calls the "Chief Transformation Officer" -- should function...In an ABC News opinion piece, the Center for Democracy and Technology Leslie Harris argues that the 'net-fueled political revolution of '08 wouldn't have been possible had the Federal Elections Commission embraced the regulations on online political speech that were bubbling up a few years back...and more.

The Democratic Strategist's Ed Kilgore is out with his critique of RebuildTheParty.com's "10-Point Action Plan to Strengthen and Modernize the Republican Party." That's the rightroots' manifesto authored just after November 4th by Mindy Finn and Patrick Ruffini, two names that should be familiar around these parts.