Do the netroots -- a term now embraced by Merriam-Webster -- represent the Democratic party base or a small but vocal minority?; the DNC announces plans for a new online platform-crafting site much like the RNC's GOPPlatform2008.com; Latino bloggers react to the presidential campaigns outreach efforts; t-shirt contest!; and much, much more.

A few weeks back, I wrote a long post asking whether Obama's networked movement was going to do more than just work to elect him president. Well, it looks like the battle to hold him accountable to his promises has already begun, over his support for the FISA bill, and especially over a provision giving the telecom companies retroactive immunity for breaking the law when they gave the Bush Administration access to Americans phone records without judicial authorization.

Obama's neglect of the netroots bores progressive bloggers; Obama's broad coalition of supporters, cultivated online, may negate the need for the netroots; dueling "red telephone" ads and a much-needed parody; six seconds of silence on a Clinton campaign call; a new aggregation site has a misleading about page; what if Bloomie were stilling running?; and Off The Bus profiles a whopping 200 superdelegates.

Kentucky bloggers are taking back their state's Democratic Party, one wiki entry at a time.  This week Ben Carter and Joe Sonka, proprietors of the progressive Kentucky blog BlueGrassRoots, announced the creation of BlueGrassWiki.  The project aims to organize information about Kentucky's 120 county parties in order to "infiltrate" local leadership in upcoming party precinct elections.

So the winners in NH or Clinton and McCain, much to everyone's surprise. Mike Connery has an excellent explanation for Clinton's success among young voters; Jeff Jarvis wonders if Obama could be the first candidate elected by the Internet; Todd Zeigler reviews Obama's revamped site design, and likes what he sees; Jose Antonio Vargas investigates the netroots' tepid support for Obama; Hillary Clinton suddenly voices support for government bloggers and transparency; and the RNC and DNC post stale responses to last night's victories.

David Brooks thinks the netroots' influence is on the wane; an anti-Hillary Facebook group has more supporters than its pro-Obama counterpart; more details about John Edwards' visit to Columbus, KY; James Kotecki writes about his experiences as one of the first videobloggers to cover the campaign; Ron Paul is raising a fair amount of money in an end-of-quarter fundraising sprint; and Fred Thompson no longer leads in the number of visits to candidate sites.

Fallout from Elizabeth Edwards' quote; Rocketboom on how Denver '08 will be open access; cracks in the liberal-left; bundling for the unbundled; Ellen Goodman weighs in on net-gender; YouTube YouChoose has issues; ABC and NBC liberate pres-video; Republicans use the net for stealth attacks; and we win an award...

The open-sourcing of debate planning; the debate on the online Right; the demographics of the online Left; the ongoing decline of newspapers; another exploitative video; and whose website is winning the most attention...

The Web on the Candidates

OpenSecrets.org has just released first-quarter expenditure numbers for all of the candidates, and while it would take weeks to analyze the amount of data they've released, Chris Bowers has a good analysis going. Barack Obama spent more than the others in almost all of the categories, and he far and away spent the most on "Internet Media" -- $299,000 -- which, as Bowers notes, is five times more than the rest of the field combined.

Joe Klein is frustrated that smart political blogging "is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere," and he points to the "spitballs" aimed at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions on the Iraq war as evidence. "Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded," he writes, explaining that only voted against the recent Iraq resolution because they were bullied by anti-war bloggers (the Netroots?). This, Klein says, its dangerous because Democratic candidates are becoming beholden to the base in the same way that the GOP embraced conservative radio in the '90s. (via Election Geek)

[We're going to post text or excerpts from the proceedings of PdF2007 here as fast as we can get them. (And we're also working to get footage from the mainhall sessions up online too, but that will take til tomorrow.) MyDD blogger Matt Stoller gave a great talk explaining the rise of the netroots, which he abridged slightly because time was tight; we're thrilled to publish the full text below. The editors.]

A few years ago, I had what's called a 'crazy uncle' theory of internet politics. I noticed that the figures who did well online all seemed like a crazy uncle saying things that are true but extremely uncomfortable, that power and authority was built on silly illusions. You know, it's like when you're a kid at Thanksgiving and your uncle starts telling you about how much pot your parents smoked, which you had never really known about. It's uncomfortable but kind of awesome.