In today's Daily Digest, we rather exhaustively recap Netroots Nation and RightOnline, the blogger conferences held this past week and weekend in Austin, Texas.

You can never leave the safety of the beltway without missing something. More twitter-dome news breaks while I'm at the beach. The Gray Lady runs with the story but misses the point. Representative Culberson makes a constructive intervention and apologizes for going partisan. Could this be progress?

Twitter in a teacup is officially downgraded from a kerfuffle to a mere brouhaha. Still, there are lessons to learn about how to communicate with Congress and who owns the infrastructure we use.

The Web on the Candidates

Danny Glover at AirCongress writes that Newt Gingrich is issuing us a "conversation challenge." Newt dismissed the Hillary 1984 video as "utterly, totally destructive of the process of thought. There is not a single thing in that commercial that enables America to solve a problem. … It’s the Entertainment Tonight version of governing a great country. … Everything is reduced to gossip, attack, whose consultant is cleverer. And it’s really very destructive." Instead, he's proposing that the nominees engage in a 90-minute dialogue once a week from Labor Day 2008 to Election Day. "Once a week with a timekeeper and no moderator. No Mickey Mouse questions. No gimmicks. Two adults, much like [Abraham] Lincoln and [Stephen] Douglas," he said.

The LA Times reports that Google, and to lesser extent other web companies like Yahoo and Myspace, is aggressively reaching out to political campaigns, looking to provide them with advertising and other services.
Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline thinks it's a smart move: "There's probably a lot less [money] than they think initially, but Google plays for the long term and they're smart to be there... The Internet and politics is a revolution, and Google and these guys are not going to lead the revolution, but they don't want to get shot in the back either." According to techPresident contributor Michael Bassik, 2004 campaigns only spent $12 million on online ads, compared to $1.6 billion on TV, but "political campaigns are expected to shift more of their ad dollars to the Web." Google will be waiting in the wings.