The Web on the Candidates

• Gaby Wood, in yesterday's Guardian, reviews the details of the "YouTube election" for British readers. Most of the examples -- the "1984" ad, Obama Girl, "I Feel Pretty," and so on -- are familiar to readers of this site, but Wood takes an interesting look at the idea of voter-created campaign ads. "The notion of a 'citizen ad' is an intriguing one, suggesting as it does both a citizen's arrest - the idea of doing something without pay for the public good - and Citizen Kane. You can, from the privacy (and affordability) of your own home, have an effect akin to that of a mogul," Wood writes. "Is YouTube the ultimate form of democracy, then, a means by which voters can have their say and politicians can really listen? Or is it something to be feared, a kind of anarchic 24-hour surveillance?" The answer to this question -- which continues to be asked about the web itself -- isn't as stark as Wood suggests.
• An anti-Hillary Clinton Facebook group, "One Million AGAINST Hillary Clinton," now has more supporters than the successful group from which it derives its name, "One Million Strong for Barack." The anti-Clinton group claims an impressive 348,556 members, while the Obama group has a 309,674. When gauging a candidate's popularity on Facebook, how should we factor in this level of unpopularity? Do the negative numbers cancel out the positive numbers? And should we take the group's claim that "whether you are supporting Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, John Edwards or Barack Obama a single goal exists, to ensure that another Clinton is not put into the White House" at face value, or is this a partisan Republican group? (Thanks, Patrick.)

The Candidates on the Web

• Last week Joe Biden sat down for a long interview with Salon's Walter Shapiro, in which he discussed Iraq, fundraising, celebrity candidates, and adjusting to the reality that everything he says and does could end up online. Responding to the growing influence of the left-wing bloggers on the Democratic candidates, Biden said, "They don't own the Democratic Party. What are they talking about?" The notoriously chatty Biden acknowledged that "there are two sides to my being straightforward and candid." When his every utterance is videotaped and blogged, "I'm going to get myself in trouble. But the only thing I decided to do -- I can't start trying to calibrate all this stuff. I really believe that at the end of the day, the public in the primaries, as well as the general election, are going to judge me for all of who I am."
• Mike Huckabee has launched a new site design, and it is good. The design is reminiscent of Rudy Giuliani's site, except it's much cleaner-looking and doesn't look broken. The campaign blog -- recently bolstered by the addition of blogger Vincent Harris -- is tied directly into the site, so that the front page image and headline link to a blog post; all of the site's news and updated content occur on the blog. A nice, but buried, feature is the video archive, which displays links to and descriptions of Huckabee's YouTube videos, which have become more dynamic and interesting of late. To get to the page, you have to first click on "Newsroom," and then click on the "Video" link on the right-hand side of the page. The feature would be better noticed if it, like the blog, was a main attraction on the front page.
• The ripples, the ripples!: Amateur art-film director and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel finally explained the meaning behind his "Rock" campaign video, in which Gravel, standing on a rocky beach, stares unblinkingly at the camera for a couple of minutes before turning around, picking up a rock, and hurling it into the water. Yesterday, Gravel told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week" that the video is "a metaphor not only for a presidential candidate, for any citizen. The ripples, the ripples. It's a metaphor, George. The ripples show the effect, and then you march off into the horizon."

In Case You Missed It...

Talking to a friend who donated $15 to Barack Obama, David All finds a story of the Long Tail in action.

Facebook | Hillary Clinton | Joe Biden | Mike Gravel | Mike Huckabee
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