Daily Digest: 5/7/07

The Web on the Candidates

• TechPresident blogger David All has started a new blog, TechRepublican.com (nice name David!) that wants to get the Republican establishment to embrace Web 2.0 strategies. "While the Internet has grown rapidly, the Party apparatus and its top officials are operating in a disconnected, Web 0.5 world. The result is that our message is failing to penetrate the modern world where millions of independent voters and modern Republicans spend a majority of their time," All writes. All and friends want to galvanize "Gen Nexters" (ooh, that term hurts) to "think, discuss, read, collaborate, criticize, share, and act to make a difference" in the Republican Party, and to usher the party into the 21st century. It's big project that will benefit from David's bottomless well of energy. We wish him luck. Also check out DomeNation, a weekly show on YouTube with David and Jerome Armstrong which will focus on politics and technology.
• Following up on his analysis of who's buying Google text ads for Democratic candidates, Steve Patterson of the Bivings Report takes a look at who's buying ads for the Republicans. In addition to gear from Zazzle.com, several of the candidates are buying ads under others' names. For example, Rudy Giuliani is buying ads for searches for himself, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain, and only Giuliani and McCain are taking out ads against their own sites.
• In an op-ed in Friday's Washington Times, Barry Casselman argued that, while "breathlessly we are informed that in 2008 Americans will elect the first 'Internet' president," Joe Lieberman's victory in 2006 over netroots-powered Ned Lamont serves as a warning that the blogs can't win elections. Over at Beltway Blogroll, Danny Glover takes issue with this assumption, pointing out that James Webb of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana both won their elections with help from the netroots. Glover thinks that Casselman is leaving out pertinent information in order to make a partisan point, which is hard to disagree with given the anti-Democratic tone of the piece.

The Candidates on the Web

• John McCain paid a visit to the Google offices last week, invited by the Authors@GOOGLE series (?) to a sit-down talk with Google employees. While he was in Mountain View, he also stopped by the YouTube offices for an interview with YouTube politics editor Steve Grove. In the interview McCain is relaxed and engaging, and, when prompted to rant for the camera, gives a good minute-long spiel against government spending and pork. It looks like this will have to serve as McCain's response to voter-submitted videos from YouTube's Spotlight series, which isn't quite what we were expecting. As James Kotecki says, the point was to talk to us, not to submit to a one-on-one interview with an politics editor.
• Dennis Kucinich has entered the Spotlight fray, and it looks like he's having a great time. After a truly strange introductory video in which he asks viewers to tell him about the time in their lives they felt "the most courage, the most security, the most peaceful, the most loved," while his wife Elizabeth's head floats over his shoulder (you really have to watch it), he's received 34 video responses, and he's already responded to a couple of videos.
• Today at 1pm ET, Bill Richardson will be a guest on Heading Left, a talk show on Blog Talk Radio. Despite low national numbers, Richardson continues to be popular with the netroots, coming in third in April straw polls from MyDD and the DailyKos.

In Case You Missed It...

Jonathan Rick points to a couple of features from Time and the Washington Post that track the candidates' movements.

Micah Sifry follows up on Obama's MySpace mess and takes a look at Joe Anthony's critique of Obama new media director Joe Rospars' side of the story.

Micah also reports that the bipartisan coalition seeking to make footage of the debates freely available has won a major victory.

Pollster.com and Janet Harris have teamed up to produce a tag cloud of last week's Republican debate.

Alan Rosenblatt looks at Fred Thompson's potential campaign and wants to launch a parallel campaign for Arthur Branch, Thompson character on Law & Order.