In what I must admit is a shocking turn of events, the Associated Press has moved beyond attacking Google (GOOG) and others it has branded as content “thieves” to embrace a page from its opponents’ playbook.

Literally.

In an internal AP memo obtained by Talking Points Memo, a senior managing editor, Mike Oreskes, states that when two AP reporters found that one bookstore had inadvertently placed Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” on sale five days before the official release date, “They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched.

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Has Sarah Palin rejoined the Twittering masses after nearly three weeks of silence? According to CNN, she’s back, picking up the name “SarahPalinUSA.”

The former Alaska governor stopped using her previous account, AKGovSarahPalin, on July 26, her last day in office. Her farewell tweet: “Last state twitter. Thank you Alaska! I love you. God bless Alaska. God bless the U.S.A.”

That account is still up, where she has more than 135,000 followers. She hasn’t posted any updates under her new name, though it already has some 2,500 followers.

It’s not clear how CNN verified that the new account is legitimate, and Ms. Palin has been a frequent target of online impersonators.

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The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned BlackBerrys, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.

“Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 BlackBerry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.”

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It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent. Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said. Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist.

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Thanks to the Web, 2008 marks a high point in the level of engagement between American voters and their presidential candidates. As Arianna Huffington declared yesterday, “I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race. The Internet.”

On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide the virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.

Here’s a quick index of AllThingsD’s digital-eye view of the fracas:

• An overview of the tech policies of both candidates.
• Election in your pocket: Walt Mossberg discovered Election ’08, a data-packed app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that uses an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning in each state based on multiple available polls.

Some would argue that this race could be decided by viral video campaigns, rather than strictly political ones. Here is the evidence:

• “Saturday Night Live” was the heavy hitter here, and it was kind of a toss-up whether John McCain and Sarah Palin’s respective appearances trumped the outright parodies of each one.
• Then there was Hollywood’s ironic plea not to vote.
• And Google’s plea (with help from The Donald) to employers for a “Vote Hour.”
• No one came close to Sarah Silverman in terms of outright exhortation, though.

Just as many of you settled into your seats to watch Thursday evening’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks was attracting his own crowd on Twitter after raising a question that strikes at heart of the blogosphere.

“It’s clear the link economy is broken,” he wrote, pointing to a write-up CNET News published on Friendster’s support for Facebook applications. The piece contained nine links, six of which pointed to previous CNET posts.

Not long after, Matthew Ingram piled on with a post dinging us for attempting “to prove how authoritative” we are “by making it look as though the only stories worth linking to are their own.

To say that their internal links are better than anything else they could possibly link to is just ridiculous.”

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Having been passed over as the running mate on the Republican presidential ticket, former eBay Inc. chief executive Meg Whitman seems to have now set her sights on the California state capitol. Call it Meg 2.0.

Whitman has been increasingly active in the Republican party since retiring from eBay in January. She initially spent her time helping raise money for Mitt Romney, her former boss at Bain & Co., in his failed presidential campaign. More recently, she has been helping run Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid. She was a contender for the VP slot before McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

On Tuesday night, Whitman all but announced her candidacy for governor of California at the Commonwealth Club.

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There are two articles about Sarah Palin on Google Knol, the search company’s abysmal new Wikipedia-like reference guide. One of them is a mess: Just a few hundred words long, the article is fraught with factual and grammatical errors. The other Palin entry is much more readable and informative, offering a thorough, balanced look at Palin’s years in city and state government and her positions on national political issues.

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Last week I criticized Yahoo for their insecure password recovery mechanism that allowed an intruder to take control of Sarah Palin’s email account. Several readers asked me the obvious follow-up question: What should Yahoo have done instead?

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The Web is abuzz with how vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email got hacked. Hackers who obtained Alaska Gov. Palin’s email password apparently used the “forgot my password” feature of Yahoo’s email service.

The hackers evidently used information they knew about Palin–her zip code, date of birth, and that she met her husband in high school–to convince Yahoo’s service into assigning a new password for Palin’s email account.

PC World notes that the security question that Palin chose didn’t turn out to be so secure. Most online services ask questions that only you should know. But in Palin’s case, it must have been something that could easily be guessed, given all of the public information available about her.

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