The Web on the Candidates

• In 2007, it isn’t enough for a satirical talk-show host to simply say he’s running for president. Yes, Stephen Colbert now has a Facebook group. As of early yesterday morning, the group, called “One Million Strong For Stephen T Colbert” (a nod to the popular group in support of Barack Obama), had a little more than 16,000 members, reports the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas reports. Now it claims more than 125,000… Just think of the YouTube videos he could produce.

• After techPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini discovered the data porn over at ronpaulgraphs.com, he produced some nifty maps showing where Paul’s donors are coming from. Now “Dan B.,” the man behind the graphs, has upped the ante, producing maps showing the locations of donors from the last 24 hours and per capita donors from the last quarter. There’s too much donor data to handle, however, so he’s using a random sample that, according to Dan, is “large enough now that it’s interesting.”

• MTV and MySpace have announced that Barack Obama will be the next participant in their Presidential Dialogue series (John Edwards was the first). This is something of a surprise; most of us had assumed that a Republican candidate would be next up, followed by a Democrat, etc. As the press release quoted some impressive numbers. The event was “streamed approximately 350,000 times. The on-air broadcast (7-8 pm ET) was the #1 program for viewers aged 18-24 across all of cable for the time period, and was seen by a total of nearly two million viewers overall (all ages).” With this kind of audience, where are the Republicans? TechRepublican’s James Durbin is worried. “Republican candidates should be clamoring to get in front of this audience, and they’re not,” he writes.

• Todd Zeigler at the Bivings Report responds to Nancy Scola’s post on techPresident about the Obama campaign’s generic emails. He received the same email as Nancy, sent by someone from Leawood, Kansas. On one hand, he likes the tactic. “Theoretically, I prefer to receive text emails w/o all the formatting and pretty pictures. I’m also confident these are working pretty well, based on Obama’s fundraising numbers,” he writes. But, like Nancy, he finds the emails pretty cynical as well. Whether we like the form or not, as Patrick Ruffini pointed out this morning, the effect of these emails on Obama’s fundraising — he’s raised more than $1.85 million in three days — simply can’t be overlooked.

The Candidates on the Web

• Sam Brownback is dropping out of the presidential race today. Sam, we hardly knew ye.

In Case You Missed It…

Jott the Vote may be a novelty, but Mike Connery thinks that at the local level, it could be a leap forward in legislator/constituent relations.

Alan Rosenblatt takes a look at three new websites that popped up in the last couple weeks: Straight2theCandidates, Connect2Elect and the Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Index.

Check out our favorite videos of the week, from a mashup of SNL and Mitt Romney to the Onion News Network identifying the most important issue facing voters: bull@#$%.

Mike Huckabee has started using Meetup, and Zephyr Teachout thinks it’s an interesting test case that may allow us to learn something about the tool’s impact on building community around Presidential campaigns.

Micah Sifry gives an update on 10Questions, our newly-launched online presidential forum. Yesterday, we had more than 7,100 unique visits, a solid increase over our first day, and average time on the site was nearly 2 minutes, with 2.2 pages/visit. There were 29 videos submitted in all, with a total of nearly 8,500 votes cast from 2,300 voters (up from 4,100 yesterday). In sum, things are going well!

Barack Obama has raised more than $1.85 million in the last three days, thanks in part to three emails sent to supporters. Patrick Ruffini wants Republicans to pay attention.

Barack Obama | Facebook | John Edwards | MTV | MySpace | Ron Paul | Sam Brownback | Stephen Colbert
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