History's Lessons for a Wired White House...Tracking the Evolution of Change.gov...Incoming Administration Faces Information Overload...Palin's Unstoppable Online Power...Just How Historic Was Obama's Presidential Run?...American Diplomacy in the Age of Facebook...and more.

This election had many firsts, but before we move on entirely to the new administration, the special meaning evoked November 4 by rejuvenating American democracy should not be undervalued. Not only did voters come out in droves waiting hours at the polls, but they celebrated the act of voting in new ways online, and they're still showing pride in the process.

The New York Times' Michael Falone makes note of a happening that Michael Whitney highlighted on techPresident earlier this week: Change.gov, the Obama-Biden transition site, quietly dropped an "Agenda" section that appeared largely cribbed from campaign materials, replacing it with an oblique 100 words on what's considered important by the incoming Obama-Biden administration; ABC News' Rick Klein has a good overview piece on some of the legal and logistical questions facing the digital arm of Team Obama as it moves into the presidency; If one of the 10 million emails the Obama campaign collected happens to belong to you, you likely recently got a request for cash donations to help the Democratic National Committee "recover the resources it took to win;" and a good helping more.

Let's hope President-elect Barack Obama had a restful Tuesday night, because it's about the only time in the next two and a half months that he won't have someone whispering in his ear with advice on what kind of presidency his should be; Perhaps even more important than the question of who will be the nation's first Chief Technology Officer is the matter of how much real juice he or she will have; As we look forward, let's not forget to look back at how we got to where we are; and more.

This has got to be the coolest data visualization I've seen yet coming out of the Twitterverse. It's also one of the smartest product placement moves I've ever seen a traditional company do online. (A glance at Tropicana's home page suggests a pretty clueful company, actually.)

(Crossposted with permission from The National Political Do Not Contact Registry blog -- Nancy)

With the media's attention focused on recent McCain campaign robo calls, it is as good a time as ever to use Twitter to track these insidious form of Democracy that both sides employ during campaigns.  

The full fury of the progressive netroots has turned on Minnesota Republican congressman Michelle Bachmann -- and it might put her House seat in jeopardy; The National Political Do Not Contact Registry's Shaun Dakin has picked up on the Twitter Vote Report idea and proposed using Twitter to track the automated campaign calls that have been in the news of late; The news today is that the Obama campaign raked in $150 million last month. That's a ton of money, and it frees Obama to compete in parts of the country where the math heretofore didn't make sense for a Democrat; and a good deal more.

The enormous number was breathtaking: six million people sent in questions through the Internet for Tom Brokaw to pose to John McCain and Barack Obama during Tuesday night's presidential town hall in Nashville. Breathtaking -- and entirely wrong; Building on what seems to be growing momentum behind using Twitter as an election protection tool, an online organizer has detailed possible standardized tags; Using donor data from ten large tech companies as a representative sample, ZDNet's Robin Harris finds that tech employees support Obama to McCain at a rate of nine to one; and much, much more.

Was last night's presidential "town hall" in Nashville hosted by Tom Brokaw was a bust?; NPR social media bloke Andy Carvin's launched an intriguing last-minute "distributed dial testing" Twitter experiment yesterday. To participate, you simply included a one to ten rating of the candidates in your tweet, set off by asterisks; expanding upon the idea of using Twitter as an election protection tool, Culture Kitchen's Liza Sabater lays out some provocative ideas for taking advantage of the decentralized, network world and the humble cell phone to mix things up; and a good deal more.

Tom Browkaw, moderator of tonight's "townhall" presidential debate is reportedly sifting through six million questions that poured in online. Yeah, um, let's hope Brokaw has a posse of twelve thousand interns, because there's no way he's getting through those alone; Campaign videos like the McCain team's "Celeb" ad may air as paid TV spots only a few times and in a handful of markets, but they can still be seen by millions -- both as earned media when news shows rerun them and on YouTube. That's powerful bang for only a few bucks; Now that the powers-that-be in the House of Representatives have revised internal web rules to free congresspeoples to start Twittering, the Sunlight Foundation has whipped up a Capitol Tweet widget. Embed away!; and quite a bit more. Promise.