The Web on the Candidates

• New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and -- sooprise, sooprise -- Rep. Ron Paul came out on top in Slate's veep picker. Paulites are still coming out for their man in full force, swamping, reports Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland, the GOP's platform-crafting website. Should the fact that Paulies are consistently able to totally overwhelm blogs, chat rooms, and wikis with their calls for a return to the gold standard make us worry about how useful unmediated political forums can ever really be?

The Candidates on the Web

• You're a Vanity Fair-reading, Subaru-driving mother of three. You rent a two-bedroom walkup, read your emails late at night, and recently switched from Safari to Firefox. How did we get so smart? We didn't. But Barack Obama did, reports Mike Madden in Salon. The well-oiled campaign's data operation is, says Mike, "an ambitious melding of corporate marketing and grassroots organizing that the Obama campaign sees as a key to winning this fall." TechPresident's Zephyr Teachout, a Dean campaign veteran, is quoted: "It's not an innovative campaign, but it's an extraordinarily professional one."

• A President Obama would appoint a National Cyber Advisor with a direct line to the Oval Office. Imagine the awesomely geeky lunches she and the cabinet-level CTO would have in the White House mess.

• While Barack Obama is skipping Netroots Nation starting today in Austin, Texas, the campaign's deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and new media director Joe Rospars will be there to meet and greet.

• Last night in New York City, Obama's field video director Arun Chaudhary gave a peek at how professionally-crafted video fits into the campaign. Arun revealed that the Obama new media team, currently numbering around 50, has "pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall."

TechCongress and Beyond

• Big Media Matt is now Think Tank Matt. Matt Yglesias -- who began blogging in 1982, at the age of one -- has The Atlantic to mount the barricades on behalf of the progressive Center for American Progress. Interesting stuff, this young writers leaving the fuzzy-bordered world of journalism for the fuzzy-bordered advocacy world. Matt, for one, doesn't see this as a big change: "From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference."

• Fox News jumps on the Twitter Dome story, reporting that the ongoing crafting of the House's new media rules has "riled Republicans." Rep. John Culberson, quoted in the piece, makes a clarifying point: digital information flows like water these days -- from Qik to Twitter to Flickr -- and so attempting to regulate vessels is a fool's mission.