The Web on the Candidates

• Citizen Debate Qs are One in a Million: "At least six million questions have been submitted via the Internet to be asked at the town-hall-style presidential debate Tuesday," reports the New York Times' Katharine Q. Seelye. "The moderator, Tom Brokaw of NBC News, is sifting through those millions of questions to find six or seven that he might pose." Yeah, um, let's hope Brokaw has a posse of twelve thousand interns, because there's no way he's getting through those alone. (While we're on the topic, six million does seem like an awfully large number of questions to come in through MySpace.) Seems a shame that the Presidential Debate Commission didn't choose to partner with, say, Digg or 10Questions.com to lend eyeballs and judgment to the effort. And given that Barack Obama affirmed his "support [for] the use of such technology" in the debates, we have to wonder why they didn't push a bit for that sort of arrangement. Aside from Brokaw's questions, about a dozen more will come from the 100 members of the Nashville-area audience, hand-selected by Gallup to find who are "truly uncommitted." #

• Which Boogeyman is Besting Google Trends?: Just after the Obama campaign launched its mini documentary on Charles Keating yesterday, and with team McCain (and particularly running mate Sarah Palin) hitting away on Bill Ayers, Politico's Ben Smith reported that a snap shot of Google's Hot Trends was showing much more interest in the S&L figure than the former Weatherman. Perhaps, but at least one keyword query on Google Trends shows more sustained interest in Ayers than Keating. In other web metric news, the, frankly, somewhat dry and meandering "Keating Economics" mini doc has been viewed more than 600,000 times. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Woo: GOP Brings a Bullhorn to a Strategic Invasion: Responding to CIO Insight's Ed Cone's recent series on the presidential candidate's ground campaigns, the Berkman Center's Gene Koo argues that, when it comes to the Internet, the GOP is doing it all wrong: "The Republicans' use of the Internet as a marketing space rather than a networking space reflects their strategic emphasis on the 'air war' over the 'ground war.' This is a mistake, not only because a similar strategic calculation put the Democrats on the defensive for the past several decades, but because the Internet is NOT broadcast television or radio." #

• McCain's Mastering the Art of Ghost Videos: Campaign videos like the McCain team's "Celeb" ad may air as paid TV spots only a few times and in a handful of markets, but they can still be seen by millions -- both as earned media when news shows rerun them and on YouTube. That's powerful bang for only a few bucks. Here's our own Andrew Rasiej, in a piece on the power of web video by the Dallas Morning News' Karen Brooks: "The McCain campaign has skillfully taken advantage of the phenomenon of ghost videos... They put them online knowing full well that supporters will distribute them for them, regardless of whether the campaign continues to promote them or not." #

TechCongress and Beyond

• With New Regs and Congressional Twidget, Time for Hill to Twitter: Now that the powers-that-be in the House of Representatives have revised internal web rules to free congresspeoples to start Twittering, the Sunlight Foundation has whipped up a Capitol Tweet widget. Embed away! While Congresspedia has an evolving wiki of governmental Twitterers, I've got my own list Capitol Hill characters I'd love to hear from first-hand. Let's see. Barney Frank. Orrin Hatch. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Barney Frank. Arlen Specter. Jan Schakowsky. Scott Garrett. Dick Durbin. Tom Davis (well, for the next couple months, at least). Leave your own in the comments. Dearest @Congress: Only half the American population doesn't think we'd get a better legislature picking names from a phonebook. So it's not like jumping on the Twitter bandwagon is going to exactly hurt your reputation. Now's a good time as any to get yourself a copy of David All's Twitter 101 guide. #

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola and Allison Fine explore the idea that Twitter just might prove to be a hundred-and-forty-character election protection powerhouse.

Micah Sifry has a look at Internet Attention Deficit Disorder and...hang on, lemme just check my Gmail...okay, sorry...and asks...ooh, a new Facebook friend request!...and, we're back, apologies...if we're all part of a networked community or a hyperconnected mob.

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