There's a fascinating story out of New Hamsphire today about what some savvy targeting of Facebook ads can accomplish in a local political race. A Dartmouth junior dropped just $51 -- less than the cost of a text book -- on Facebook ads. Through Facebook's ad targeting program, the ads only popped up for her Dartmouth classmates and students at Plymouth State University. Vanessa Sievers, class of 2010, ended by winning her race for Grafton County Treasurer by a 600 vote margin.

The New York Times' Michael Falone makes note of a happening that Michael Whitney highlighted on techPresident earlier this week: Change.gov, the Obama-Biden transition site, quietly dropped an "Agenda" section that appeared largely cribbed from campaign materials, replacing it with an oblique 100 words on what's considered important by the incoming Obama-Biden administration; ABC News' Rick Klein has a good overview piece on some of the legal and logistical questions facing the digital arm of Team Obama as it moves into the presidency; If one of the 10 million emails the Obama campaign collected happens to belong to you, you likely recently got a request for cash donations to help the Democratic National Committee "recover the resources it took to win;" and a good helping more.

Medill Reports's Jason M. Breslow has a roundup of how Twitter is being used for politics these days. We're seeing folks use it to debate, to share ideas, to organize (though, as Jason mentions, we're not seeing either Barack Obama and John McCain use it to good effect). Witnessing the evolution of how people are pulling and shaping Twitter to fit their own political purposes is downright fascinating; What's most remarkable about the new Obama iPhone app is that it's actually the fruit of a relationship between the Obama campaign and a team of ten or so volunteers; The Christian Science Monitor's Ben Arnoldy asks the million-dollar question: can people-powered outreach really win presidential elections?; and quite a bit more.

There's a lot of hype surrounding microtargeting -- which is the process of targeting voters scientifically based on consumer and demographic data. This piece in Salon yesterday on "Obama's super marketing machine" is no different. But as someone with a bit more than a passing understanding of what microtargeting is, I have to shake my head a little at articles like this. Because the media gets it almost completely wrong -- whether it's hyping relatively mundane technologies or celebrating "sexy" examples (dial up 40 year old Vodka drinking Volvo drivers!) that have almost no bearing on microtargeting's usefulness in real life.