If it can be said that there's a theme running through this OneWebDay celebration this year, it's "let's actually use this thing to change the world," as OWD founder Susan Crawford put it to me this afternoon in New York City's Washington Square Park where just under a hundred or so people gathered to celebrate the global network. Praising the seemingly useless iPhone beer app, Harvard Law School's Jon Zittrain joked that he saw OWD as the "celebration of the fertile crap" the Internet produces -- crap that fertilizes the web's "goodness" without much caring which is which. That's long been the web ethos: let's throw everything we've got to the wall and see what sticks.

But what was striking about today's event was the put-up-or-shut-up feel to it all. In other words, it's time, it seems, for the fertile crap-generator to start producing concrete change in the real world.

With the stomach-turning shakiness on Wall Street reverberating around the planet, our global interconnected is painfully apparent today. But it's perhaps fitting that today also happens to be the day on which we celebrate the wonders and promise of the networked world; What do Nancy Pelosi and Starbucks have in common, besides the west coast thing? They've seen the power of online-based idea tools in action; Tomorrow in Reno, Nevada, the Obama campaign will kick off a timely series of swing-state discussions focused on how technological innovation can power economic revitalization; and a great deal more.

I've been on the road since Thursday, first at a working meeting of the Sunlight Foundation in DC with people working on collaborative governance web designing, and then yesterday in Minneapolis at the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), where I moderated a panel on the same topic, and today in Houston at a miniconference at the Baker Institute on the internet and politics. A couple of times over the last two days, I managed to pull out the N95 and shot a couple of fun, Qik videos with some of the folks I bumped into at NCMR. Check out Jane Hamsher, Susan Crawford, Robert Greenwald, Deanna Zandt, Craig Newmark and Tom Steinberg.

John McCain takes a drubbing on YouTube; the conservative blogosphere and Obama's Auschwitz "gaffe"; Congress, Franking Rules, and wikis; the Forum on Participation and Politics Online is next week; your humble Daily Digester passes the baton; and Newt gets 100,000 signatures on a domestic oil drilling petition.

It's that time again, when we present our favorite political videos of the week. Some have gone or will go viral, and some will fall by the wayside. But all of them hit some kind of political or cultural note that proves the ever-increasing influence of online video. Sometimes videos come from the ground up and grab the mainstream media’s attention, like the video of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer getting tasered. But sometimes a video comes from big media first, like Sally Field getting cut off by Fox as she gave an anti-war speech at the Emmys.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani and his critics continue to fight via video, a Ron Paul supporter goes over top with a video in support of the Texan candidate, and there’s much love for the intertubes.

Have a favorite video? Send it to us at techpres AT personaldemocracy DOT com.