This morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace are announcing "MyDebates.org,," a "landmark partnership" that they claim "will do for the debates what TV did in 1960 for the Nixon Kennedy election." Their joint press release says this new site "will offer a host of interactive tools for viewers to virally engage in the political process." The release notes that "marks the first time that the CPD has paired with an Internet property to include online functionality into the event series and traditional debate format." Unfortunately, the CPD's landmark is little more than a shack. At best.

I'll be going live to the web from time-to-time during the next two-and-a-half days as Twitter (my handle is @mlsif), and every time I'm actually streaming live, Qik--the fabulous live video streaming service we're using--will send a tweet letting you know.

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.

[With the federal government in transition, and high expectations for the Obama Administration to revolutionize how government uses the web and other technology to make its processes more open, interactive and effective, we thought it would be interesting to repost this white paper, which was recently posted online by the Federal Web Managers Council. The council is an interagency group of almost 30 senior web managers from the federal government, that includes web directors from every cabinet-level agency, several independent agencies, and representatives from the judicial and legislative branches. It serves as the steering committee for the Web Content Managers Forum, a group of nearly 1,500 government web managers across the country. These folks are on the front-line of how government uses the web--and as you'll see from what follows, they're chomping at the bit to move forward into the Networked Age. The Editors.]

It's worth taking a moment to applaud the work of Macon Phillips and the other members of the Obama transition new media team, for how they have hit the ground running and built a dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open and creative government website. Every day, it seems, some new element appears on Change.gov...details after the jump.

News continues to dribble out of Chicago on the future of Obama for America. First, Obama blogger Christopher Hass says there are now some 4,000 house parties occurring this weekend across the country to foster discussion of the movement's future--a healthy jump from a week ago. Second, attendees at last weekend's summit meeting in Chicago have received the following memo by email, which they've been urged to share widely. A copy made its way to my in-box and I reprint it below:

Andrew Rasiej and I are in Cambridge, MA today and tomorrow at the Berkman Center's "Internet Politics 2008" conference. Several techPresident contributors are here, including Gene K., Ari M., Garrett G., Chris R, and David A. and tons of friends and colleagues. The conference is semi-open in the sense that we are allowed to blog about it under the "Chatham House rule," which means that we're not supposed to name people (hence my semi-cryptic references), but that we're free to use the information shared, unless someone says something is completely off the record. Some of the conversations are being recorded and will be eventually posted to the Berkman website, however. So, consider yourself forewarned, I'm somewhat handcuffed here...

While most of the country's attention is focused on the transition underway in Washington, another vitally important transition is taking place right now in Chicago. I'm referring, of course, to the future of the Obama movement and network, or what some organizers refer to as "OFA2" (as in, Obama for America II). Thanks to reporting by Peter Wallsten in the Los Angeles Times, we know that "This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit at a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan."

What exactly is going on? The Obama people are saying very little. For a team that has been refreshingly open about the transition in Washington, the transition to OFA2, which seems to be de facto centered in Chicago, has been a totally top-down, one-way affair.

Yes, the Obama political team has been asking for input from its supporters about the future of OFA2. But what kind of guidance can isolated individuals and disconnected house parties give, other than vague affirmations of the need for "change" and their desire to pitch in? (The suggested agenda for the hosts of these meetings, as posted on the Obama website, is also mostly focused on each group determining its own priorities, rather than being part of a national conversation about the future of the Obama grassroots movement.) And how motivating can it be to participate in a one-way process, especially when the internet makes multiway communication and collective deliberation so energizing and empowering? That's the question; let's dig into the details after the jump.

"Today we're trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues -- with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top."

Ordinarily, you wouldn't get too excited about reading those words on a website. But when they are on the official blog of the President-elect, things are a little different. In fact, this is a big deal. When you consider that for the last eight years, the occupant of the White House has essentially told the public "you get input once every four years, after that I'm the decider," this is huge.

The folks who gave us ObamaCTO.org, which has attracted thousands of participants in a conversation about the priorities for Obama's Chief Technology Officer, have branched out and added a new forum for debating options for the future of Obama's movement. It's early in the process, and as I reported yesterday, organizers are meeting in Chicago now to try to hammer out the answer to this question. On http://ideas.obamacto.org/pages/obama_movement you can add your own suggestions and vote on the ones already there. This could get interesting...