(Crossposted from ClickZ.)

Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million. Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.

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Over at NPR, Andy Carvin is leading a project to extend what we learned from Twitter Vote Report, launched by a humble blog post here on techPresident, to cover the upcoming inauguration weekend, January 17th through 20th, in DC. That's terrific. Central to the thinking behind TVR (of which Andy was a core part) was making the project as open as humanly possible so that it could be repurposed, repackaged, and improved upon. What's particularly exciting to see is that Andy and his co-conspirators, fellow TVP veterans Dave Troy and Andrew Turner, have a plan to achieve something we fell short on in the chaotic scramble of Vote Report: turning local journalists onto the valuable content that was pouring in through the channels we'd set up.

Making stimulus bill first example of Obama transparency strategy can improve the bill, build support by GOP & voters who are skeptical after banks' behavior after first bailout, and begin comprehensive "democratizing data" effort to improve agency performance and involve public.

This afternoon, Team Obama ported the day-of-service feature from the Presidential Inaugural Committee site to its own stand-alone domain, USAservice.org. For some background on what they're up to when it comes to citizen service, see here. What still isn't so clear where this effort slots into things after inauguration weekend. I suspect those details will simply shake out elegantly (enough) in the next few weeks. But I'm a process geek, and so I can't help but obsess about how all the working pieces -- Obama-Biden Transition Project, Presidential Inaugural Committee, Obama Administration-to-be -- fit together.

Some of the most popular state, local, and general-interest blogs in the progressive blogosphere were brought low this morning, when the lone developer behind the hosted community-blogging service SoapBlox threw in the towel. Well-regarded sites like Pam's House Blend, Blue Jersey, Michigan Liberal, Swing State Project, and MN Progressive Project found earlier today that they couldn't access either the public-facing front ends of the site or their sites' content-management backend. As of this afternoon, the sites are (mostly) back up, but that hasn't eased fears that a core part of the left's online infrastructure isn't all that sustainable.

We've been doing some housecleaning (in preparation for rolling out a site upgrade) and it's been some time since I dug in and updated our list of top political blogs. Indeed, an embarrassingly long time. Sorry!

Anyway, here's a fully revised and up-to-date list of the top 50 political blogs, along with two top 20 lists for the top liberal and conservative blogs. All three lists are based on Technorati's measure of "authority," which is the number of incoming links to the blog for the last six months. Let me be the first to emphasize that this is hardly a perfect metric. The number of incoming links shown by Technorati sometimes varies, which is a quirk of how their databases work. And not all incoming links are created equal, but Technorati has no way of saying so. In other words, please don't obsess about a blog's exact position on these lists, as bloggers like to say, your mileage may vary.

As we keep up the vigil on Barack Obama's naming of a Chief Technology Officer, let's have a look at both what some close watchers want from the first federal CTO and what the gossip on the street says about what the incoming administration has in mind for the job...In congressional meetings on Obama's proposed stimulus package, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor pushed the President-elect to "put the entire contents of the legislation online in a user-friendly way to see how the money is being spent"...There's an interesting under-the-radar online tussle happening around the future of American agriculture and the future of Tom Vilsack...and more.

I'm off to Las Vegas tomorrow to spend three days perusing the latest and greatest tech gadgets at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. While much of that is geared toward another endeavor, I'll be keeping an eye out for tools and technologies that could be used for political purposes.

If I see anything that looks like it has potential for attracting, communicating with, or mobilizing voters/activists, I'll snap some pics, write up a blurb, and let you know about it.

In the meantime, if you've got anything you'd like me to look for, or something I must see, leave me a comment.

Let's take a bite at one of the bigger questions floating around the technology and politics world at the moment. The subject: the future of the Republican Party. Does the redemption of the GOP rest with mastering the field, communications, and fundraising technologies that Barack Obama used to good effect in his presidential win? Or do conservatives need to take this moment, when they control not one of the branches of government, to re-figure out just what it is the party stands for, what political need it fills in the hearts and minds of American voters? The real answer, of course, isn't one or the other -- not wholeheartedly, at least. But implicit in the question is a compelling debate over just what technology is good for when it comes to politics, from winning elections to governing in a way that gives you a shot at getting re-elected.

The half dozen contenders for the post of RNC chairman gathered yesterday for an event that was threaded through with what might fairly be called an obsession with technology...When we discussed a report in the New York Times yesterday that Barack Obama would finally (cue whiny voice) be naming a Chief Technology Officer this Wednesday, we commented, "we'll see." Well, looks like we won't...The Obama transition has gone down a somewhat different road than Bill Clinton in revealing its donors -- though, of course, the motivations and expectations are entirely different...and more.