The Web on the Candidates

There's a new GOP Bloggers straw poll out, and this month Fred Thompson is the conservatives' fave.   However, the Hotline's Blogometer is starting to notice a pattern: "a new name is mentioned, bloggers fall in love, compromising facts are revealed, and a new name is mentioned."  While Thompson came out on top this month, last month it was Rudy Giuliani, in January it was Mitt Romney, and in December it was Newt Gingrich.  Who's your pick for April?

PrezVid's Peter Hauck links to a remix of Katie Couric's 60 Minutes interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards. The Blue State's Todd Haskins made a montage of Couric's questions, removing the Edwards' responses.  The result makes Couric look particularly aggressive, asking a lot of "Some people say..." questions. 

The Web on the Candidates

He got it wrong: Yesterday morning, Ben Smith of the Politico reported that John Edwards was suspending his campaign due to his wife Elizabeth's recurrence of cancer. As we know now, Edwards is staying in. Smith's source got it wrong, and Smith wrote a good piece describing how he got the story and the differences between reporting for a newspaper and for a blog. "Though I’ve spent the last several years at major newspapers – the New York Observer and the New York Daily News most recently – I’ve done much of my reporting on blogs, and have developed an instinct to let my readers know whatever I know, as soon as I know it... But the scale of this story was simply too big to report that way, to share information with high but imperfect confidence – and without making that level of confidence crystal clear. I should have waited for a second source, or hedged the item much more fully. Or simply waited for the news conference like everybody else." Hat tip to Smith for owning up to his error so quickly and openly. Very bloggy of him.

Eric Kleefeld at TPMCafe writes that a new Zogby Interactive poll finds that the "Vote Different" anti-Hillary video had no effect on two-thirds of of likely Democratic voters, and "the remaining one third were three times as likely to prefer Clinton after seeing it."

The Web on the Candidates

Comments from around the web:

Ben Smith of the Politico: "The web consultant who left Obama's web consulting firm after taking credit for the Vote Different ad has been shadowed in the past by accusations of 'dirty tricks.'"

Jerome Armstrong at MyDD: "I know the founders of Blue State Digital, and this was a petty move on their part..."

Hotline On Call: "So -- they fired the guy for creating a creative wonderpiece."

The Web on the Candidates

The search for parkridge47: It's been two weeks since techPresident's Micah Sifry first posted his email exchange with "parkridge47," creator of the Obama/Clinton "Vote Different" video, but the search for his or her true identity continues. In the video's wake, Micah and PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej have been quoted and interviewed all over the place, including CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Townhall.com.

Jeff Jarvis has an idea: let's videotape ourselves asking questions of the presidential candidates, upload them to YouTube, and tag them PREZCONFERENCE. "This way, we’ll see which questions the candidates answer and which they don’t. In the UK, Conservative leader David Cameron answers five questions a week, three of them selected by the voters. We need to hear our candidates answer our questions here." He offers five examples of such videos, taken at at the VON conference at San Jose.

The Web on the Candidates

Taking a cue from a question he was asked at the Politics Online conference last week, Jerome Armstrong offers a "succinct guide for doing R&D in the campaign" on MyDD. The top three suggestions: "look out onto the Internet for what's being done... in order to create innovation, look out at what's happening in areas outside of political campaign websites."; "don't try everything, less is more... doing one thing right, instead of a dozen things half-assed, makes the difference between a signal getting through and clutter lost in the shuffle."; and "work with the brand that is your candidate."

Another Politics Online post-mortem: Alex Clover from the Bivings Report lists his highlights from last week's Politics Online conference, which include Jerome Armstrong on Second Life, Giuliani advisor Patrick Ruffini on online only-events, Chuck DeFeo of Townhall (and now of techPresident) on "flooding the zone," and Joe Trippi on the end of big money. It's another great synopsis of this year's conference.

The Web on the Candidates

The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas writes about the presidential candidates' use of video, and the reviewers that pick it apart. Specifically, he interviews Jeff Jarvis, James Kotecki, and techPresident's own Micah Sifry about what the candidates still have to learn about online video. Online viewers want something different than they're getting from the candidates; while one of Hillary Clinton's recent Hillcasts had about 15,000 visitors, a popular video of YouTube featuring Clinton singing an out-of-tune national anthem has been viewed over 1.1 million times. A lot of viewers are looking for that human touch: "Look at how the candidates are talking in their videos. With a few exceptions, they're mostly looking sideways, not talking directly to the camera. The important thing about this medium is it's very human and intimate. A voter comes across and clicks on you. You should talk to that voter and look at him in the eye," says Jarvis. Micah agrees. "There's something fundamentally different about video online. Viewers are looking for that rare, unscripted, revealing moment, to get a little sense of who these candidates really are."

The first piece of voter-generated video to make a splash in Campaign 2008 has hit, and with it comes a mystery. Is "Vote Different" really the work of an amateur, a civilian if you will? Or is it a shrewd move by someone who wants to stir up trouble between the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns? After all, comparing Hillary to Big Brother, droning on about her "conversation" with America and portraying her supporters as silent automatons is hardly what Obama supporters want to say about the former First Lady. Or is it?