The Web on the Candidates

• \ˈnet-ˌrüts: The Next Right's Matt Moon steals some of the thunder of the clever portmanteau's acceptance by Merriam-Webster by suggesting that the "netroots" is, to borrow a phrase from the New York Post's Kirsten Powers, "a loud anomaly" that overvalues partisanship and confrontation -- and not a true, sustainable grassroots movement.

• Game on! Days after the RNC launched an innovative collaborative platform-crafting tool (profiled by me, Nancy Scola), the DNC's new platform committee chief, and Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, announced that the Dems would be doing, err, pretty much the exact same thing. The Obama campaign had announced a set of online tools to facilitate "Listening to America" parties, but the effort didn't stack up all that well against GOPPlatform2008.com. (Related: IBM's rather neat Many Eyes "shared visualization" project now has a hub up and running for the Democrats' in-person platform parties. May we all become a nation of chart-toting Ross Perots.)

• This video report from the Washington Times' Carrie Sheffield explores the idea that Republicans are "scrambling to play catch up" when it comes to online fundraising. Note the appearance of TechRepublican's David All, who explains the lag by saying that many of the Americans still without affordable and speedy Internet access lean Republican.

• Republican strategist Mindy Finn suggests that we've more or less reached the point where "online political strategy" is just plain ol' political stratemegizin', rooted in "the timeless fundamentals of participatory democracy."

The Candidates on the Web

• Newsweek's Andrew Romano, for one, couldn't care less if John McCain can use "a Google" or not. The four-term senator's "computer illiteracy," argues Andrew, "doesn't reflect a lack of curiosity -- it reflects a lack of necessity."

• Wall Street Journal: "Latino Bloggers React To Candidates’ Outreach Efforts." You're busy, so I'll summarize: the Latino community is hardly homogeneous, and reactions are mixed!

• The Huffington Post's Amanda Michel asks an excellent question: why the different press reactions to Mayhill Fowler's gotcha moments with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson's hot mic ("I want to cut his...") oopsie on Fox? Amanda calls the disparate ways the incidents were handled "the basic psychology of hypocrisy."

TechCongress and Beyond

• Future Majority's Kevin Bondelli's is quite "riled up" over House Republican Policy Committee chairman Thad McCotter's sarcastically commie-flavored video on the Twitter Dome Scandal. Perhaps most irksome to Kevin: the pro-soc-net video -- posted on an account less than a week old -- spells YouTube as "UTube."

• Social networking is reshaping charitable giving. One reason? It seems to hold true for both politics and panda-bear protection efforts -- people are more likely to respond to friends and acquaintances than to professional fundraisers.

• Threadless loves democracy! But it doesn't <3 partisanship, so if you are going to enter the community-driven t-shirt company's latest design contest, make your t-shirt neither red nor blue.

Internet access | John McCain | Netroots | online fundraising | party platforms
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