[Following is an email I sent out this morning...]

Good morning from the south side of Brooklyn, all!

Many of you know my commitment and activism around protecting voters from fraud, disenfranchisement and general craziness. In 2004, I traveled to Ohio to volunteer with the Election Protection coalition; this year, I wasn't able to make it out of town (due to this lovely little addition to the family: meet Izzy Louise).

I've instead been working on a digital election protection project that uses a variety of tools to allow people to report on their voting experiences: check out Twitter Vote Report at http://twittervotereport.com/ . There are a couple amazing things about this project:

– you don't have to use Twitter to report: text messages, phone calls, iPhones, Androids are all in play
– an *amazing* all-volunteer team came together from across the country to build out the coalition, site & tools in under two weeks

"This is a historic moment" is what we're going to hear all day today, and I could be prouder to have played a part in making new technologies the means to a better end. (For those keeping score at home: I did the logo, design, website buildout, and helped make the maps and other bits look nice.)

I'll also be reporting live for GRITtv with Laura Flanders from 12pm-2pm ET today on what we're seeing; you can also watch the 5-minute clip of me on yesterday's show, too:

Hope this finds you well… don't forget to go vote. ;-)

Drumroll, please… I went and got myself a dog! Please meet and introduce yourself to Ms Izzy Louise:

Her story: She was rescued by the super awesome folks over at Rat Terrier ResQ from a backyard breeder in Texas. Which means, pretty much, that she spent the first three years of her life in a cage outdoors, and has had to overcome incredible obstacles. Thanks to the love and patience of her foster mom, Jacki, she's done just that, and is slowly adjusting to life with me in Brooklyn. As I type this, she's snoozing on the window shelf I built for her next to my desk. It's a dog's life!

There are a bunch of ways you can keep up with her progress online, if you're into that sort of thing– I'll be posting more periodic updates in my own accounts, but here are her locations online:

• Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/izzylouise/
• Updates: http://twitter.com/izzylouise
• Dogbook, on Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/dogbook/profile/view/5218571
• Dogster: http://www.dogster.com/dogs/902462

Quick hit here on a Saturday morning: I wanted to share some of my favorite tweets from last night's debate– I was down at The Change You Want To See, in packed room of rabble rousers, streaming Current TV. Enjoy…

• (Not an actual tweet, but he was sitting next to me and said…) @Andrewboyd: "Jim is winning."
• @opprecht New strategy in Afghanistan: exploding poppies!
• @JillFilipovic are we drinking whenever mccain smiles or laughs inappropriately
• @katiehalper McCain: "I have a record" (it's an Abba record)
• @ebj123 Waiting for Jim Lehrer to annouce he is wearing a bracelet too, but his just says "Fabulous".
• @Elana_Brooklyn McC: "i'm not talking w. U. Neener neener

Bonus: best tweet from the Clinton Global Initiative meeting this week goes to Natasha Chart at MyDD, kicking off the drinking games early:

• @NatashaChart mccain just plugged nuclear nrg, so those of you following #cgi08 at home now have an ironclad reason to have a tequila shooter b4 10am

I'm excited to head upstate next week, back to some old stomping grounds in Ithaca, NY. I'm participating in the Park Center for Independent Media's symposium, and I'll be presenting with David Mathison some thoughts on rapid response and journalism via social networking tools like Twitter. Yippie! It'll also be good to see a bunch of friends and colleagues — Roberto Lovato (who is putting his faith in my Dunkin-Donuts-fueled driving skills, bless his heart), Tracy Van Slyke, Robert Greenwald, David Cohn, Amanda Michel… the list goes on and on.

Then a day or two of downtime with the parents while I'm in the neighborhood, which always does the soul some good. But alas, it'll be back to the city to resume apartment hunting madness. Anyone have any leads on a dog-friendly 2 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn?

Please go read xkcd. Hilarious.

Yesterday, Allyson Kapin of Rad Campaign and Women Who Tech pointed to the supposed Ten Commandments of Twitter and wondered how many we agreed with. Me? Some, I guess, but it got me thinking first about Twitter etiquette (Twitterquette? sounds like a dessert or a lawn game), and then other old and new netiquette issues.

It's fascinating to watch unspoken rules evolve in new social systems over time, and then curmudgeonly frustrating when someone tries to write them down. I can see how religions all over the world got themselves into trouble early on. "Wait, when he said 'honor thy father and mother,' does that mean I have to go over for dinner every Sunday? Seriously?" I admire the TenCommandments dude for giving it a shot, but… yeah. Telling people how to act is going to irritate some of the people some of the time.

It's curious to me because I'm a firm believer in using the tools however best you see fit, whatever fits your info-digestion style. Me, I use Twitter mostly to follow people I know in person (I'm training myself to finally stop saying "in real life," btw, since it's all real life), and a little bit to get breaking news. It's been indicated to me in a passive way that I'm not participating in good Twitter karma by following everyone that follows me. There's even an app that will check your mutual status called Twitter Karma. It's a bogus "rule" slowly being imposed on a nascent system of social transactions.

It reminds me of 1994, when if you didn't link back to someone in your little HTML page of family photos, there was bad blood between you after that. People, people, people! Come on. First of all, we're all adults here. I see people I'm close with, that I'm following, that are not following me back. I know there's a 99% chance it's because I tweet too much for their diet, or their community, and I can understand that. (In fact, I'm going to have to clean out some high-volume tweeters this weekend myself.) The point is not for me to thus impose a new rule to counteract the karma rule, but to ask people to live and let live.

We all have different styles of communicating, yes? This is a point we can agree on? In fact, when I'm doing trainings and workshops on using new tools, it's one of my main points: don't let anyone else tell you how best to use the tool. Sure, you can take suggestions or follow someone's lead. I've showed people how to use Twitter just to read news feeds, or just to know what their friends are up to, or to stay on top of tech trends.

In the end, social rules are going to evolve no matter what I say (le sigh, my power is not yet infinite and cosmic), and it's going to be fun to watch these new sets play out. It's kinda funny that, even after 20 years, you can still make a major social faux pax by not emailing someone back. We come up with all kinds of reasons in our little overactive brains: "she's pissed at something I said," "she never got the email," "he never really loved me." Maybe they just… forgot.

Hey, I'm at SXSW Interactive till early Tuesday morning. Are you? Twitter me!