Daily Digest: 10/31/07

The Web on the Candidates

• Under-the-radar emails spreading false rumors about Democrats have become one of they key tactics of the "right-wing smear machine," writes the Nation's Christopher Hayes. Unlike traditional hierarchical strategies, email forwarding is "organic and peer-to-peer," Hayes writes, and elements of the right-wing have been using it for years, from the smearing of Al Gore in 2000 to emails about John Kerry's experience in Vietnam in 2004 to fake tales about Hillary Clinton in 2007. It's not a new story but Hayes offers fresh layers of reporting.
• Earlier this week Blog P.I. William Beutler (who also works on Fred Thompson's campign) offered up a wonkish analysis of Stephen Colbert's impact in the blogosphere in the "Yeas and Nays" section of the Washington Examiner. According to Beutler, after Colbert "announced" he was "running," he received the same amount of attention in the blogosphere as did Hillary Clinton, and Rudy Giuliani wasn't far behind. Why would a joke candidate get so much attention? "Blogs are attracted to shiny objects, and Colbert is nothing if not a shiny object. Even serious-minded bloggers can't resist," he says. But on his own site, Beutler graphed stats from Google blog search and found that, after a big jump when he announced, Colbert has fallen below both Clinton and Giuliani. Yeah, but look at Facebook: Colbert domi-Nation.
• The conversation about the efficacy of the left versus the right is heating up again, and Jon Henke rounds up some pertinent links. Like others, Henke thinks there's nothing innate in the left that makes it better-suited towards the web. At the moment, the left has "a common cause, a unifying vision and a raison d'etra [sic]," he writes, but a change in power could alter the equation. Soren Dayton agrees, but adds that some liberal groups are ahead of the curve with using technology. For example, the Center for American Progress sends out a daily email with links to top liberal blogs. The right, Dayton says, has nothing like this. If they did, it "would totally reshape the blogosphere. And, frankly, this might facilitate the growth of new blogs that are more media savvy," he writes.
• A video that some are claiming "truth boats" Hillary Clinton has been making the rounds online, and now it's bubbled up to the mainstream. 13-minute clip from a longer film in which one-time Clinton donor Peter Paul, a former partner of Spider-Man creator Stan Lee and convicted felon who was caught up in a fundraising scandal involving Clinto, makes allegations that, among other things, he staged a fundraiser for Clinton in 2000 based on Bill Clinton's failed promise to back a business venture. The allegations are old, and older versions of this material have been circulating since last year, but the film is new. It's been viewed more than 1.5 million times on Google video and parts have been viewed a total of more than 600,000 times on YouTube. It's not nearly as entertaining as listening to Hillary singing off-key or sounding like Big Brother, and it's long. And maybe not true. I don't know; I can't really follow it.

The Candidates on the Web

• The Talk Clock is back! After last night's Democratic debate Chris Dodd's scrappy web team posted its fun graph of the candidates-as-Pez-dispensers that shows that, once again, the big three were given much more time to speak than the other candidates. If you only pay attention to big media you might forget that there were more than three candidates on the stage, but as the talk clock shows, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson were there too! And they talked, a little.

In Case You Missed It...

Zephyr Teachout returns with her Mike Huckabee watch (or Huckwatching, for short). If you haven't already noticed, Huckabee's had the most web traffic (except for Paul) consistently now for two weeks. He's almost raised $1 million online and his percentage growth rate on Myspace and Facebook outstrips the others. Also, he's been on at least eight blogger conference calls over the past seven months.

Thanks to publicity surrounding Barack Obama answering the top video on 10Questions, and a continued involvement from email advocacy campaigns, we continued to get a lot of new visitors to the site after the weekend's surge in traffic. We had a total of 8,200 unique visitors Monday, bringing the total number of voters to more than 16,000, and the number of votes has broken the 50,000 mark! More updates here.

Monday Barack Obama participated in the second MySpace/MTV Presidential Dialogue and responded to the top question on 10Questions.com, which became the object of a MoveOn email campaign. But is it fair to let a Goliath like MoveOn play along with thousands of individual Davids? We consider both sides of the argument.

Zephyr Teachout posts three myths about online organizing, and how a great website is more like a great coach than a great cheerleader, and takes the opportunity to mention Red Sox manager Terry Francona.