YearlyKos becomes Netroots Nation; a new widget gets out the women vote; a state-by-state study of voters' web habits reveals unsurprising results: IA and NH are the most tuned-in states; and Hillary Clinton launches a new rapid-response site, shows a renewed effort to control the flow of online information.

Caroline Giuliani likes Barack Obama; Fred Thompson goes 2.0; Huffington Post exposes the money chase; vote-trading gets legalized; bloggers debate diversity issues; Mitt Romney defends his religion on YouTube; and Elizabeth Edwards explains that "We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman."

Howard Dean on "the most extraordinary invention for empowering ordinary people since the invention of the printing press: ....speaking for myself, even after the campaign four years ago, I didn't realize what a powerful tool this is.....It has re-democratized America. There is an enormous shift in power." More after the jump...

The bigfoots of the press were all in Chicago this past weekend for YearlyKos, and they churned out lots of coverage. So did the littlefoots of the web. Plus, Ron Paul beats Barack Obama on YouTube!

As I flew home on Saturday from YearlyKos, I felt equally elated and exhausted from three days of near-constant interaction with so many bloggers, activists, journalists, campaign operatives and techno-politicos. The panels I attended were usually good and sometimes illuminating, the food was so-so, the the long distances between panels got old quick (at first I told Micah that the complainers were wimps; I soon found my own inner wimp), and Presidential forums and breakout sessions added glamour to the whole event.

And it's always a good feeling to actually see, in the flesh, folks with whom I spend so much time with on email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Status updates on Facebook and Twitter:g ood fun. Status updates in the form of actual conversations: priceless.

The techPresident team left YearlyKos yesterday evening, before Markos Moulitsas's keynote, and we're taking today off to catch our breath and nurse our sore feet (it was not for nothing that some were calling YK the "Blogger Exercise Conference"). Here are a couple of quick thoughts and quick links in case you can't enjoy a Sunday in August without your techPresident hit

The YearlyKos Presidential Candidates forum has just ended and I want to get a quick post up as I wait for the Obama breakout to begin. Topline impressions: While the crowd was clearly most friendly to Edwards (no surprise given the baseline polling that DailyKos does of its readers), Obama gained the most. And we'll all win if the next inhabitant of the White House hires an official blogger...

Bill O'Reilly may think he's taking on DailyKos with his seemingly daily attacks on the liberal mega-site. But if you look at the numbers, he's doing them a huge favor. Traffic and membership registrations on DailyKos are surging.

A few random tidbits from Micah and I as the second day of YearlyKos winds down (well, as the sessions wind down…)

I’m in Chicago for the second annual YearlyKos convention and since yesterday afternoon I’ve keep coming back to the same conclusion: I think, nearly three-and-a-half years after Dean for America collapsed in the wake of the Iowa caucus loss, that Howard Dean might have won the campaign.