Today on Veracifier, TPMtv reports from the Personal Democracy Forum. I headed down to the conference representing Veracifier, and here's a roundup of some of the highlights: 

• Thomas Friedman shared thoughts he's had since writing The World is Flat, which will result in three new chapters in the book, including a hopeful outlook, as he feels its premature to cede control of the next century to any one country. Andy Carvin did a valiant job taking notes, as well as from Friedman's interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 
• Researcher danah boyd gave a primer on how youth are living in the online space, and encouraged candidates to go out and meet them and shake hands by leaving comments and messages on their MySpace and Facebook groups and profiles. Here's the full text on her site.
• Farouk Olu Aregbe told the story of how he started the One Million Strong for Barack Obama Facebook group, which has been a pretty powerful force in the candidate's rise online.  He mentioned that he was listening to that John Mayer song when he did it.
• On a panel with our own Josh Marshall, Eli Pariser of MoveOn and Jeff Berman of Facebook had a civil but heated argument over how MySpace is emerging a corporate-owned commons for political discourse. Pariser's point: users need a "Bill of Rights" to keep arbitrary commercial decisions from potentially limiting their right to speak or organize, and cited the scuffle over Obama's namespace.  Berman's point: "This is a democratic platform and it needs to be, but democracies have rules." (thanks, Andy.)  He thinks MySpace's users will keep them honest, and cited a recent revolt on Facebook against an unpopular feature.  Both sides seemed earnest, and neither seemed satisified; this will likely be an issue that keeps rolling.
• Later in the afternoon, PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej issued a challenge to the candidates to be the first TechPresident, which he details in his interview on Veracifier today.
• On Flickr: photos by JD Lasica and Steve Garfield from the conference.

Part one of our PDF coverage is embedded below; you can get the sharing code here.  We'll have part two later in the week. Also, be sure to check out Rocketboom's beautifully done report, including interviews with Friedman, Rasiej, and Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame).

-- TIM SHEY