Quick Hits: Leaving Netroots Nation Edition

I'm at the airport now headed home from Netroots Nation and feeling beat up and burnt out from four days of panels, networking, and - as is always the case at this conference - partying. I totally concur with Kevin that for a conference of by and for bloggers, it's amazingly hard to get any blogging done at the conference. There are just too many people to talk to and panels to attend and you end up spending the vast majority of your time offline.

The Young Voter PAC Celebrity Bar Night event - co-sponsored by Future Majority - was a huge success last night. I think the draw of Darcy Burner, Markos, and others behind the bar brought a lot of folks in, and we also benefited from the fact that our party was the last official party of the conference and it seemed to have good word of mouth most of the day on Saturday. In fact, so many people showed up that we ran out of contribution forms for the FEC compliance and we had to frantically run off copies. It created a bit of a bottleneck (and some grumblings about the line being too long and too slow), but as far as problems go, those are good ones to have. Don't know how much the event raised for the Young Voter PAC yet, but the event went as well as it possibly could have and I think it brought in a good amount. Sarah and Jane both have pictures from the event and video of the celebrity bar tenders. Those will likely go up in the next few days once we all get back to our respective homes and properly recover from the weekend.

One of the other casualties of the conference (aside from blogging) is my feedreader, which will take some time to get through. In the meantime, here's a few things I've been able to pull out so far:

• Tech Republican reports that young Republicans are starting to encourage their party to reach out to young voters. Check out the talking points - very similar to what we've been saying to Democrats for the last four years - real peer to peer outreach about the issues:

  The trick is not coding a killer Facebook app or producing a phenomenal YouTube video. Those things are necessary, but not sufficient to create a real youth movement. The real challenge is instead (1) to identify the issues most important to youth voters; (2) to craft a Republican message to respond to those issues and concerns; (3) to deliver that message in such a way it feels authentic and real--the trick to being successful online as David Almacy explained yesterday; and (4) to pass the finished product along to youth voters through the right online portals (social networks, blogs, etc.).

• PEW Research suggests that cell phone-only users may not be skewing the presidential polls (by leaving younger, and likely more progressive, voters out of the sample pool). However, the study they quote found that including a cellphone sample in their poll increased Obama's lead over McCain by three percentage points. They don't quote a margin of error, so I really don't know what to make of this . . .

Oops, getting called to board now. I'll have to post the rest later.

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