President Obama took off the gloves this week and started to attack Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney by name in speeches throughout the week. That freshly confrontational stance manifested itself in the president's re-election campaign messaging online on YouTube, and though online advertising as well.

The House of Representatives will make many of its key legislative documents available in an open data format online as of January 1, the Committee House on Administration announced Friday.

Jim Pugh, CTO of Rebuild the Dream (and before that director of analytics and development with Organizing for America), recently shared with techPresident some slides from a New Organizing Institute training that he's done, that help illustrate the difference between viral and sub-viral growth. We all throw around the term "viral" with little distinction, and it's helpful to put some definition on it--especially as we see many references to the Occupy Wall Street movement's viral growth, or similar earlier talk about the Tea Party.

After the Socialist primary election that happened earlier this month, the French presidential campaign is heating up and social media are being used by both parties in what can be seen as the second social media campaign. In 2007 both Sarkozy and his opponent Ségolène Royal used tools that called for citizens participation.

Obviously, all those emails worked! The Obama campaign is touting that it is close to reaching one million individual donors to the president's re-election effort. More precisely, they've reported garnering 766,000 donations from 606,000 people in the July-September fundraising quarter, which is on top of 680,000 donations that they received from 552,000 people in the April-June quarter.

Over at Gawker, Jim Newell chronicles his personal experience facing the business end of President Barack Obama's online campaign money machine. In the last couple of weeks, the Obama campaign has sent email after email and text after text to people on its email lists asking for money in just about every way possible. The recurring theme is the "Obama dinner"...

Longtime readers of techPresident know we love looking at YouTube political videos because the site offers so much interesting data about what people are watching, how videos are being shared, and so on. And while we haven't yet seen the break-out satirical mashups that charmed so many politics junkies back in 2007-08, there's plenty to be learned from a look at how the various presidential candidates and related national political figures are doing on YouTube.

OK, that headline is probably over the top, but after reading Dave Winer and Nik Cubrilovic's warnings this past weekend about Facebook's new "frictionless sharing" system, I was left wondering if Julian Assange of WikiLeaks wasn't on to something when he said that "Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented."