There was a fair amount of pretty amusing media coverage of the announcement, most of focusing on the handover of the magazine from a 75-year-old longtime magazine legend to a 28-year-old new media newbie. Here are some of the choice excerpts:

The Washington Post called me a "hotshot" in their write-up; Portfolio headlined "And a Child Shall Edit Them," noting that Jack's been editor "12 years longer than his replacement has been alive"; and the Washington Examiner noted that I was "a 28-year-old former blogger who has been with the magazine for one-tenth of Limpert's tenure."

Gawker's post made me laugh: "Young Garrett Graff, who started at Fishbowl DC at the age of like 15 (ROUGH ESTIMATE) and then got a job at Washingtonian, is now the new editor of Washingtonian. He is an up and coming whippersnapper if we have ever seen one. Don't end up a cabinet member recommending foreign wars based on vague Georgetown cocktail party gossip ten years from now, Garrett. That's how they get you."

Perhaps my favorite commentary on the incident was the mean-spirited back-and-forth on the Washington Post's story, including this one: "Ben Bradlee he ain't."

Anyway, I'm quite excited. As I told my hometown newspaper, The Times Argus, for their story: "Becoming editor, I'm not sure there is a better job in Washington, except for maybe President of the United States."

Here's my top ten:

1) Heyday — Kurt Anderson's novel about the joy and wonder of the U.S. circa 1848 was great, filled with historical nuggets about the characters who inhabited the era of Manifest Destiny.

2) The Forever War — The memoir of the NYT's Dexter Filkins's coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was strikingly good and has been compared to many reviewers to Michael Herr's Dispatches from the Vietnam War-era, although to Filkins' credit (?) there are many fewer mind-altering drugs involved.

3) Team of Rivals — I never tire of reading about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, at any time, I have a half-dozen such tomes in my reading pile by my bed. Doris Kearns Goodwin's now-famous Cabinet-focused opus was a particular treat after the first third, which was as good a sleep aid as I've found.

4) America America — Ethan Canin's novel about a New York politician's fictionalized 1972 presidential run is loosely based on Ted Kennedy's career, though it's worth reading more for the portrait of political hope found and lost.

5) The Best and the Brightest — Too often when this phrase is used today it's forgotten that David Halberstam's classic is an indictment of the best and brightest rather than a celebration thereof. It's amazing telling of the descent into Vietnam is all about the small decisions with outsized consequences and how we stumbled into something we didn't really think about.

6) Nixonland — I just finished this a few days ago here at home and am again impressed with Rick Perlstein's ability to tell history. Following on the heels of his Goldwater history, he traces how we as a nation went from an overwhelming Lyndon Johnson victory in 1964 to an overwhelming Richard Nixon victory in 1972.

7) The Race Beat - Looking at this third consecutive book about the '60s and '70s, I seem to, without realizing it, seemed to have spent a good chunk of this year reading about that period. This history of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of the reporters who covered it is half-journalism story, half-social history and a great all-around education of the period.

8) The Looming Tower — One of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books I read this year as part of my budding 9/11 research (the other was the also excellent "Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll), this was a fascinating history of al Qaeda's rise and the missed opportunities we had to stop it.

9) God Is Not Great — I spent a week in 2006 drinking my way through Scotland with Christopher Hitchens and he convinced me then, despite his famous propensity for drink, that he was a tremendous scholar. His treatise on the ways that God is corrupted on Earth was really influential in my still-evolving faith.

10) Here Comes Everybody — Clay Shirky's new(ish) book on social media helped refocus my teaching and thinking on the subject and has now become a central part of my class.

For 2008, I also need to give a nod to two friends who had books out this year. My college newspaper editor/mentor, Sugi, had her first novel published, Love Marriage, which draws on her Sri Lankan heritage to tell a great love story. Meanwhile, the debut novel, Blood Kin, of another college classmate, Ceridwen Dovey, reminded me of Anne Patchett's Bel Canto, one of my favorite books of all time.

As I continue my way through all of Graham Greene's canon, I had a number of strike-outs this year before I landed on "A Sense of Reality," his collection of short stories, that renewed my faith in him as my favorite writer.

Read my previous favorite book lists from 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.

The subject of new media seems particularly of interest to foreign political groups visiting the U.S.; I've spoken recently to groups from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and a whole host of Latin American countries.

Here are some of the articles that I've been quoted in recently:

Miami Herald:

Garrett Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, believes young voters -- especially the first-timers -- are savvier and more committed than they're getting credit for.

Graff pointed to the Iowa caucuses: ``Four times as many under-30 voters participated in the Iowa caucuses this year as in 2004. In Missouri we saw three times as many, and in Tennessee three times as many.''

Graff believes that outreach to younger voters using technology familiar to that age group -- text messaging and social websites such as Facebook -- will keep them engaged through Election Day.

I was also a guest on The Guardian's weekly tech podcast: "Garrett Graff of the Washingtonian told me more than a month ago that if Barack Obama won the election it would be because of his innovative use of the mobile phones. Mobile phones were part of an overall digital strategy that turned millions of supporters into an army of volunteers and donors. Even before the general election, Obama's internet strategy had already proven decisive, Garrett said. He had already defeated the most powerful machine in the Democratic Party: The Clintons."

The Boston Phoenix: "McCain is actually no Luddite.... But you wouldn’t know that from the way the McCain campaign has seemed to distance itself from technology. Though the Republican candidate’s Web site does have the nowadays-requisite Flash videos and a blog that’s updated a few times a day, 'the McCain campaign seems like it’s going out of its way to avoid using modern technology,' says Garrett M. Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. 'There is no documented proof that the McCain campaign has sent out a text message. I have never heard of it [a McCain text message], and I know of no one who has.'"

Now, just for the record, the McCain campaign did, after this article came out, send a single text message to voters the day before the election. One text message. Once.

Continuing my unofficial international speaking tour, I'm off to Duke next weekend for a panel and then on to the University of Missouri, Westminster College, and then, of all places, Spain to speak at the 2008 NewsXchange conference.

I'm happy today that it was caught on video. On the other hand, if Hillary had won, I probably wouldn't be bragging about my crystal ball powers.

Here's the chart that accompanied the article:

My debut op-ed in the New York Times today deals with the Obama campaign's innovative use of text messaging for offline organizing:

"Sometime between now and the convention, Barack Obama, just like the cool kid in study hall, will surreptitiously send a text message announcing his pick for vice president. The ploy may seem silly — the fad candidate adopts the latest tech fad — but it’s an important part of one of Mr. Obama’s most under-recognized campaign efforts."

Read the whole thing here. I have to say: It's pretty cool to be published on the same page as Thomas L. Friedman.

My favorite is still the Chuck Norris facts ad:

Here's the story, "The Ultimate G-Man: Robert Mueller":

The sun had just come up when Robert Mueller and James Comey walked up to the West Wing of the White House shortly after 7 am on March 12, 2004. Mueller and Comey had been up for much longer. Neither the FBI director nor the deputy attorney general had slept much in the previous week, and that was before al Qaeda terrorists killed 191 people in train bombings around Madrid. It was windy and cool; the thermometer hovered at 40 degrees as the two men prepared to brief the President.

It was, both fully expected, the last time they would enter the White House. In their desks at the FBI and Justice Department were letters of resignation they expected to submit; they would be joined by a dozen other Justice and FBI officials. The only reason the letters hadn’t been submitted already was that the men, at the request of the attorney general’s chief of staff, were waiting until John Ashcroft had recuperated from gallbladder surgery to the point where he could resign as well.

To understand that day, you have to go back to the 73-word oath that kicks off every federal career.

You can read my full Capital Commentary on the subject here.

There was a time back in 2000 during his maverick, Straight Talk Express-debuting run for the White House when John McCain was the master of online technology. It was, after all, his surprisingly strong online fundraising haul that allowed him to stay competitive after a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary. The Web back then was a different place. In the parlance of the Internet, it was Web 1.0—brochure-like Web sites focused mostly on e-commerce with little to no interactivity. It was a one-way medium.

Over the last eight years, there’s been an explosion of innovation online as the Web moved into what is now known as Web 2.0—highly interactive and engaging Web sites characterized by information sharing and collaboration on projects, as well as sites like Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg that allow users to network, create content, and build communities. John McCain seems to have missed this movement—an oversight that may have profound implications both for his campaign and the entire nation if he is to become president.

You can read the whole thing here. This has been an issue I've been following since last fall (here's my Washington Post op-ed on the subject) and that I explore in much greater depth in "The First Campaign."

The blogger convention in Las Vegas, then called YearlyKos, was fiery and filled with the tensions of a new power base emerging in the party. Columnists like Maureen Dowd trooped out to the Riviera Hotel, on the seedy end of the Las Vegas strip, and Democratic leaders like Harry Reid spoke, albeit warily at times.

The environment this past weekend bespoke a new level of maturity and acceptance among the blogging crowd. This year’s location, the glassy and professional behemoth that is the Austin convention center, is best-known as the setting for tech’s biggest confab, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and the national press corps was mostly elsewhere. The bloggers are not news anymore.

You can read all my future Capital Commentary columns on the Capital Comment blog.

"Want to know exactly how many Democratic-leaning Asian Americans making more than $30,000 live in the Austin, Texas, television market? Catalist, the Washington, DC, political data-mining shop, knows the answer. CTO Vijay Ravindran says his company has compiled nearly 15 terabytes of data for this election year — orders of magnitude larger than the databases available just four years ago. (In 2004, Howard Dean's formidable campaign database clocked in at less than 100 GB, meaning that in one election cycle the average data set has grown 150-fold.) In the next election cycle, we should be measuring voter data in petabytes."

"It has been a busy time here aboard Mercy. Our scheduled four day stop in Pearl Harbor was cut to a two day stop in order to get us headed west sooner. I’m sure that many of you are asking the question, “With what has happened in Myanmar, will USNS Mercy be going to help?” As of right now, I have to say, “I just don’t know.” With this early departure from Hawaii, the powers-that-be are certainly positioning us to do that – provided, of course, the government of Myanmar would let us in. Too many unknowns at this time to know what the outcome might be."

I'm really proud of Rosie and how much she's internalized and evangelized the stuff that we learned this spring. Go Navy!