(I hope you'll join me in applauding all the fine work that my good friend and colleague Josh Levy has put into the Daily Digest. It's a pleasure to be here. -- Nancy)

The Web on the Candidates

• Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher captured hallway video from this weekend's DNC rules committee meeting, and one sub-two minute clip of Clinton supporter Harriet Christian has, after a link from Matt Drudge, climbed to more that 700,000 views on YouTube. Christian unleashes some fiery invective on both the Democratic National Committee and Barack Obama and proclaims "I'm no second-class citizen." Hamsher rounds up some of the many YouTube responses to the Christian clip, calling it a "Rorschach test for how people view what's going on in the Democratic party."

• Speaking of Drudge, Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin read the tea leaves and suggest the fedora'd provocateur is leaning away from John McCain and towards Obama. (While we all may wish that many in the media weren't so willing to follow Drudge's lead, he still has demonstrated a remarkable ability to set the national news agenda.)

• In the continuing kerfuffle over the credentialing of state-focused bloggers and other new media for the upcoming Democratic convention in Denver, Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland highlights one particular case where Juan Melli’s news and activist hub Blue Jersey was passed over in favor of a site operated by an newspaper, and New York one at that. Bloggers and online activists are finding a disconnect between the web world and the Democratic establishment.

• Behold the rise of the techroots? On Open Left, Daniel De Groot teases out political lessons from the teachings of tech futurist Ray Kurzweil. Some are a bit out there (see "Human-computer blending"), but it wasn't so long ago that Larry "Change Congress" Lessig and Tim "net neutrality" Wu weren't exactly on the tip of politicos' tongues.

The Candidates on the Web

• A recent report from James Rainey's LA Times that all is not well for John McCain in YouTube land is still making waves amongst the online right. The Next Right's Jon Henke responded to the Rainey piece this way: "The Right invests virtually nothing in genuinely good, strategic online infrastructure, but Republicans constantly wonder why they aren't this effective online."

• Slate’s Christopher Beam highlights some proactive web maintenance: team Obama's dropping of an online endorsement by a Chicago priest criticized for mocking Clinton. But the web's memory, Beam finds, is a long and retentive one.

• In an compelling experiment, Christian Science Monitor's Patchwork Nation blog is assessing Election ‘08 from the perspective of 11 different American communities, from Nixa, Missouri to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Tracking emails sent to faux voters in each of the locales, reporter Dante Chinni notes that all three candidates have switched from targeted missives to more generalized news updates, requests, and appeals.

In Case You Missed It...

After pouring over Barack Obama’s campaign filings, Kate Kaye reports that the bulk of the $3 million the Obama campaign spent on online advertising in the first third of this year went to Google.