The Web on the Candidates

• John Edwards and Barack Obama "have distinguished themselves in the presidential field by running campaigns that deliberately part with a longtime rule of election-year politics: Keep the spotlight on the candidate," writes Salon's Michael Scherer. While their attempt to build "semiautonomous political movements" is not wholly altruistic (they do want to actually win), the strategy is an acknowledgment that the power of the Internet and of organizing lies in connecting supporters with other supporters. "The whole focus of the Internet program is to enable people to work together to take action on the issues that matter," says Ben Brandzel from the Edwards campaign. Adds Andrew Rasiej (this site's founder), "simply asking people for money or e-mail addresses rarely builds support. The campaign that encourages voter-to-voter communication has the potential of leveraging the power of the Internet."
• "Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them," writes Markos of the Daily Kos. "All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist." Most people would probably agree, though Jeff Jarvis points out that, from a Democratic standpoint, it's probably prudent to record every second of your own appearances as well, "for why not create your own narrative rather than leave it to a bunch of GOP shooters?"
• Last week Liza Sabater, a TechPresident contributor and blogger at culturekitchen, released a remix of the Cluetrain Manifesto that she calls "The Cluetrain Manifesto for People-Powered Politics." Whereas the classic book by David Weinberger, Chris Locke, and Doc Searls analyzed the way the web was changing the marketplace, and thus the way we share knowledge and socialize, Sabater's remix talks about how the web is helping to create "networked political constituencies," turning the original manifesto's announcement that "markets are conversations" into "constituencies are conversations." A must-read.

The Candidates on the Web

• The haircut that won't die: Sarah Wheaton at the Caucus reports that Mike Huckabee is using a joke about the price of John Edwards' haircuts to raise money. He added a barber's pole to his site and initiated a new fundraising drive, asking donors to send in the price of a haircut (this was reported by Wheaton, but apparently the site has been updated; there's no mention of the price of a haircut on it now). Jokes about haircuts aside, the barber pole continues the fine tradition of finding new, "funny" images to act as metaphors for fundraising, from Howard Dean's baseball bat to (my favorite) Bill Richardson's hot pepper.
• Our friends at TubeMogul, a site that tracks the video viewership across the web, have noticed that Hillary Clinton is the first candidate, Democratic or Republican, to surpass Barack Obama in the number of YouTube views. Sometime on May 20th, Hillary's horse passed Obama's, thanks to the overwhelming (and frankly, surprising) popularity of her Spotlight video asking supporters to vote for her official campaign song. But where are those Hillcasts she promised?
• James Kotecki has nothing but love for Dennis Kucinich, who, weeks after leaving the YouTube spotlight, is still responding to people's questions. James links to one video in which Kucinich responds to YouTube user SonofNewo's question about media reform, and the answer evolves into a passionate defense of YouTube. "If it wasn't for YouTube, how would I even get my message out? The media wants to control the debate in this country..."

In Case You Missed It...

Alan Rosenblatt takes a look at Bill Richardson's new website and decides that it's good, but not yet great.

David All posts a video he shot
of Steve Urquhart of Politocopia speaking at the PdF conference.

Fred Stutzman starts a conversation about what constitutes authenticity in social media.

Barack Obama | Dennis Kucinich | Hillary Clinton | John Edwards | Mike Huckabee
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