The Web on the Candidates

Is Al Gore running? Leonardo DiCaprio couldn't get it out of it him, but after he won an Oscar for best documentary last night people are talking. Patrick Ruffini noticed that Gore's web site has a new splash page asking visitors to send their names and email addresses to Congress; Ruffini wonders if it's a sign of bigger ambitions. "A good e-mail list is something any candidate needs to hit the ground running. And if you’re smart, you capitalize on high-impact events like the Oscar win to collect e-mail addresses."

In a profile of Students for Barack Obama leaders, the Merced Sun-Star looks for ways that campaigns can use social networking sites like Facebook to get people elected. Meredith Segal, executive director of the group, knows it's about more than online organizing. "We recognize that we have tens of thousands of members online. But unless we get those people out knocking on doors, participating in phone banks, registering voters and obviously ultimately voting, (our) online organizing will be little more than a powerful way to demonstrate support for (Obama)."

Ben Smith of The Politico reports that a new Hillary-obsessed website, JustHillary.com ('It's All About Her"), has launched. It chronicles its editor's obsession with Clinton and, by extension, the media's obsession as well. It features links to Hillary-centric news articles, editorials, blog posts, YouTube videos, and looks like it was designed in 1997.

A straw poll conducted by GOP Bloggers has Rudy Giuliani at the top of the heap at 32.2%, over 8% higher than Newt Gingrich, the runner-up. Another interesting metric is the "candidate acceptability" poll, in which Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel has a -67% approval rating, probably stemming from his break with President Bush on Iraq.

Blaming "Bill Donohue and his calvacade of right wing shills," embattled blogger Amanda Marcotte resigned from the John Edwards campaign yesterday.

Is Marcotte a casualty of the boring-down of campaign bloggers? Daniel Drezner thinks they're "little more than good PR stylists." Danny Glover goes further with the thread and considers Zack Exley's point about politicians writing their own blogs. However, if we're talking about the problem of boring and restrained blogging, "Exley is living in a fantasy world if he thinks politicians are going to be much more open on their blogs than their hired hands. That won't happen as long as bloggers unrestrained by campaigns parse every word for hidden (and often imagined) meanings."

The progressive blogosphere has been waiting with baited breath for news about the fate of John Edwards' bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen after they were criticized for writing anti-Catholic slurs before working for Edwards. Salon reported that they were fired yesterday, but TAPPED and others have heard otherwise. And Glenn Greenwald has been building an unbelievably long list of links to other blogs covering this.

The MSM has been covering the story with mixed value; for example Time Magazine does a decent job of putting it into larger context, but oddly claims that the story has an antecedent in "Democrat" John Thune's hiring of bloggers in his run against Senator Tom Daschle in "2005." Hello, rewrite? (Read our seminal story on the Thune bloggers episode here.

It's been a busy week in the 2008 presidential campaign--Hillary Clinton launched her online "conversation" (see David Weinberger's spot-on critique) and went to Iowa; John Edwards also did an online video web-chat that he calls a "live online discussion"; Barack Obama laid low and let the explosive growth of one unofficial Facebook group (now at more than 158,000 members) speak for him; and Bill Richardson formally announced his campaign launch.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic candidate who showed the most growth in online grassroots support, as measured by trends in the number of friends they have on their MySpace page and in incoming blog posts to their campaign site was Richardson, whose MySpace numbers were up a whopping 61,100% and blog posts up 285.8%. Of course, those numbers have to be put into context. A week ago, Richardson had only one friend on MySpace; as of last night (Sunday, January 28), he had 611. His incoming blog link tally, as measured by Technorati, jumped from an anemic 92 to a still feeble 355. But, hey, you have to start somewhere.

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