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On Our First Federal CTO: Nope, Not Yet: When we discussed a report in the New York Times yesterday that Barack Obama would finally (cue whiny voice) be naming a Chief Technology Officer this Wednesday, we commented, "we'll see." Well, looks like we won't. Next Gov's Allan Holmes quotes an Obama transition spokesperson calling that report "wrong," adding for clarity, "there is no CTO announcement on Wednesday." The waiting continues. In the meantime, go on and join in on the CTO prediction market our Matt Burton has set up.

McCain Said "No" to Announcing VP Via Text or Web: The National Journal's Lucas Grindley adds context to a bit of news broken by the aforementioned Patrick Ruffini. The McCain campaign, reports Ruffini, was presented early on with the idea of announcing its VP pick online or through text messaging. They declined, seeing the approach as "undignified" (Ruffini's words). Grindley quotes Ruffini as calling that decision "just so self-defeating and so illustrative of the problem" facing the GOP. Grindley frames the choice as a retrograde move rooted in the idea that only a television-based rollout of Sarah Palin could deliver the wallop necessary to counter Obama's post-convention bounce -- of a piece with the rest of the McCain campaign, where the former fighter pilot seemed to be flying by instinct, not instruments. That said, McCain would likely have been skewered for the same technical and logistical hiccups that plagued Obama's VP announcement, and his campaign simply didn't have the new media team in place to make much use of the data that an online announcement would have generated.

Obama's Twitter Account Appropriated: Now, a Twitter update from Barack Obama that asks followers to take a survey in exchange for five hundred bucks is suspicious enough. But when CNN host Rick Sanchez tweets "i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today," your spidey sense should probably confirm that something is up. The Twitter accounts of Obama, Sanchez, and handful of other famous folks were compromised yesterday. TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has screen shots and details. How'd it happen? Twitter's Biz Stone blogs that someone "hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account," meaning, it seems, the whole Twitter system was compromised. Still, given that @barackobama has been silent since election day, it was nice to hear from him again.