Daily Digest: 7/2/07

The Web on the Candidates

• Two weeks ago we reported about John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition, in which the campaign encouraged supporters to use Eventful to "demand" an appearance by Edwards in their town. As Alex Hunsucker from Eventful writes, Los Angeles had been in the lead for most of the two weeks, but suddenly Hunsucker noticed a change: the small town of Columbus, KY (pop: 229) had taken the lead in the number of demands for Edwards. The reason? Responding to presidential candidates' neglect of rural areas, an Edwards supporter named Shawn Dixon has been helping organize the other small towns in the Columubs area to demand Edwards come to Columbus. To date, there are 641 demands for Columbus, which beats out Eureka, CA and Ann Arbor, MI for the most demanded town. Los Angeles has dropped to number four, with 221 demands.
• Andy Carvin was in the media room at last week's Democratic All-American Presidential Forum, sponsored by PBS at Howard University. Lamenting the fact that the candidates weren't asked about the digital divide -- a favorite topic -- Carvin sought them out in "spin alley," where some of the candidates lingered after the debate. While he managed to get Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and Mike Gravel to tell him how they would close the digital divide, he wanted more. "The lesson learned: it’s hard to get more than a sound bite when the candidates are in spin mode," Carvin wrote. You can watch video of his interviews here.
• Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards have all jumped onto the text-messaging bandwagon, though they're still experimenting with how to best use the technology reports Jose Antonio Vargas at the Washington Post. With over 15 billion text messages sent within the country every month, "campaigns believe it's a technology they can't afford not to exploit," Vargas writes. "The way I think about it is, if we can support our 'American Idol' contestants by texting, why not our presidential candidates?" asked Tim Chambers, co-founder of Media 50 Group, but no one has utilized text-messaging as well as have campaigns in the Philippines, South Korea, and Spain.

The Candidates on the Web

• I know you couldn't wait any longer for something iPhone-related, so here it is: Ron Paul's campaign has been the first to optimize its site for the iPhone. Created by the design firm Terra Eclipse, which also redesigned Paul's website, it looks pretty cool. The pared-down site first presents a vertical menu with links to an about page, a calendar, the blog, videos, and the other links you'd normally find on a horizontal navigation menu. Each takes you to the appropriate page on Paul's site or on YouTube (the iPhone lets you view complete web pages). It's too early to tell what the adoption rates of the iPhone will be, but it's a good guess that other campaigns will take up this strategy no matter what, if only to appear completely on top of the tech game.
• Chris Dodd took his turn in the YouTube Spotlight last week, asking viewers to ask their senators on camera to support the Dodd Amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, which calls for bringing home the troops from Iraq. As of this morning, there are ten video responses to the request, but none of them are interviews with Senators (two of them are actually responses to another video that somehow got linked to this one). Some commenters are critical of Dodd's use of video and want to make sure that he'll respond to them; others are critical of his stance on the war, or of it's timing. But no one has yet posted a video of themselves interviewing a senator, asking him or her to support the amendment. Dodd has another three days in the Spotlight, so there's time, but it's a holiday week and the senators might be hard to track down.

In Case You Missed It...

Alan Rosenblat was watching Meet the Press yesterday, and when the site Hillary is 44 was mentioned, he checked it out. It was down. Meet the Press does wonders for web traffic, he concluded.

Colin Delany discovered "a damned interesting application" called Active Access that can help campaigns keep their information in front of voters, on their desktops and web sites.

Hillary Clinton has announced "HillCam," a new feature of her site that will allegedly show a "behind-the-scenes" look at the Clintons July trip through Iowa.

Barack Obama has launched a campaign in Eons, the social site for people ages 50 and up, reports Alan Rosenblatt.

Zack Exley writes that this cycle's campaigns are behaving as if Howard Dean's bat -- which registered unprecedented fundraising numbers from grassroots supporters -- never even happened.