A group of Obama supporters has crowdsourced the Fight the Smears campaign with a new website, Smearbusters.org. Using search engine results, the site compiles a list of smears ("Guilt-by-association with Ayers" is one, with 180 hits) and then brokers the smears to a team of volunteers. The idea is that the volunteer will go to the forum, blog comment thread, etc. and join in the discussion, providing counterbalance to the smear.

David Kendall, the University of Tennessee student accused of hacking Gov. Sarah Palin's email account, was indicted today by a federal grand jury. According to the indictment, Kendall is charged with unlawful access to Palin's email account, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail and a $250,000 fine. One can certainly imagine that with the high profile nature of the case, and the public disclosure of Palin's materials, federal prosecutors will be gunning for Mr. Kendall.

Bill McGeveran, an information law expert, raises questions about the government's case at the Info/Law blog.

Professors Orin Kerr and Paul Ohm, probably the two most knowledgeable scholars in the country on the subject of computer crime, are both dubious about the way the indictment achieves felony charges. (In short, the unauthorized intrusion into Palin’s e-mail needs to have been in furtherance of some other crime or tort; in typical cases that would be fraud or identity theft, but here it isn’t clear what that other crime or tort might be.)

In his most recent post, social media expert Stowe Boyd has called out John Edwards' now-defunct new media operation. The problem? When Edwards left the presidential race, he also vacated most of his impressive social media apparatus.

Yesterday's NYT turned its gaze to the patterns of political connection young people are establishing in social media. In an article entitled Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On, Brian Stelter describes a techno-political paradigm-shift: young people now turn to the social filter to find political information, as opposed to the traditional "professional" filters of the MSM. Nothing surprising or groundbreaking here, as we're saying the same things about "digital natives" that we've been saying about bloggers for ages.

When it comes to social media, I'm a digital native. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter - these services are deeply integrated into my daily life and, to a certain extent, the lives of my friends and family. The fact that I am a native makes me well-suited to explain the technology and its uses and benefit; the cost, of course, is losing the non-native perspective.

After watching the Iowa returns and reading blog and press accounts, I'm starting to see a potential third way for social network technology. Caveat, I don't have ethnography to back this up, this is just my opinion, but I think there's something here. The old model of social network sites and campaigns proposes that some uber-tool, say a great Facebook app, leverages all sorts of information and eventually gets out the vote or raises funds. That is, the end goals of the electoral process can be attacked programatically, that all problems are solvable with enough data. A nice idea, but not true. Facebook's Beacon and Social Ads are insightful here; even with unlimited data and great programming, machines attempting to "socially" influence fall short; the algorithms and points of interaction just aren't human enough. I don't want to join Blockbuster just because I'm served ads with the face of some guy I've met a few times, and I probably won't switch my vote just because a candidate is spamming my newsfeed.

As reported in various blog and print sources, Facebook has announced changes to Beacon, the controversial ad program. According to the reports, there will be a change to the story posting flow, requiring users to approve a story before it is sent to the Newsfeed. This does address some of the concerns regarding information leaks through Beacon.

The New York Times reports that ABC News and Facebook have partnered in the creation of a new US Politics application. The application, originally designed by Facebook as a simple way to find and support politicians who have created profiles (the sparse Canadian version is here), boasts charts, polls and interactive news features, with content supplied by ABC.

MoveOn, the online advocacy group, has turned its sights on Facebook's new advertising program, Beacon. The group is asking Facebook users to sign the following: "Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites--or let companies use my name to endorse their products--without my explicit permission."

The New York Times reports on Stephen Colbert's Facebook Group "1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert." Like anything Colbert, one should be cautious when drawing serious inferences, but the report begs a few questions. First, what does this "support" mean, and what does it say about political use of Facebook?