The White House announced a new $100 million TechHire initiative aimed at expanding accelerated tech training, with half the money specifically dedicated to supporting young Americans facing barriers to training and employment.

Code for America will be partnering in 2016 with the local governments of Kansas City, Missouri; Long Beach, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York City, New York; Salt Lake County, Utah; and Seattle, Washington; the organization announced yesterday.

The headline from Politico’s Mike Allen blares “Kochs use high tech to track left,” but the details of Kenneth Vogel’s new report on the right-wing billionaires’ intelligence gathering operation are more prosaic. “Culling geo-data embedded” in liberal organizers’ social media posts in order to track their movements sounds high-techy, but paying attention to such public information is hardly that big a deal.

Campaign finance start-up Crowdpac is launching a new platform today that will allow people to nominate themselves or others for elected positions and gather pledges of support, in order to help them gauge whether to run, Fredreka Schouten reports for USA Today. She notes that Chris Rabb, a Democratic candidate for the Pennsylvania state legislature, decided to run after someone nominated him via Crowdpac and more than a hundred of his Facebook friends pledged their support. (Rabb, an old friend of PDM, was the founder of Afro-Netizen.)

The media gossip site Gawker has announced that it will shift its focus to politics, with a strong emphasis on commentary and satire, Ravi Somaiya reports for the New York Times.

Companies are microtargeting their pitches at journalists on Facebook, Jack Marshall reports for the Wall Street Journal.

If you are a transportation data nerd, then this long and detailed post by Todd Schneider analyzing 1.1 billion individual taxi trips taken in New York City between January 2009 and June 2015, plus some 19 million recent Uber rides, should make you quiver with joy. There are all kinds of eye-opening findings in the data, my favorites being the morning drop-off times for cabs going to Goldman Sachs’ and Citigroup’s downtown headquarters and their primary points of origin (do bankers not live above 23rd St. anymore, Schneider astutely asks). Schneider has made all the data, software, and code that went into his analysis freely available.

The World Bank has released an interactive map showing where $168 billion in its development programs is spent, worldwide, Sarah Kessler reports for Mashable.

Edward West shares the news of the birth of the Collaborative Technology Alliance, which is focusing “on the creation of tools, strategies, and networks to build a new collaborative commons.”