Daily Digest: 9/11/07

The Web on the Candidates

• Two Washington Post reporters have discovered a connection between the Mitt Romney campaign and an anti-Fred Thompson website called phonyfred.org (the site is currently down). Michael D. Shear and Rob Pegoraro found that the domain was registered to the owners of Under the Power Lines, the website for a consulting firm co-owned by Warren Tompkins, who is Romney's lead consultant in South Carolina. The site itself (the Post has a screenshot) is a pretty nasty affair meant to call Thompson's conservative credentials into question. If true, the connection to the Romney campaign would be a continuation of the lovely tradition in South Carolina of smearing primary opponents with too much momentum (remember John McCain's illegitimate black child?).
• The College Republican National Committee is making a push for its members to submit questions to YouTube for November's Republican CNN/YouTube debate. In the inaugural video (that's way, way too dark -- try some backlighting!), national chairman Charlie Smith asks the candidates, "How will you move away from using five-year band-aids, and move towards thirty-year solutions?" So far two others have submitted videos; to keep track of their progress, go to the group's YouTube page. (Hat tip, eyeon08)

The Candidates on the Web

• Last week we linked to Mike Bloomberg's new Facebook and MySpace profiles, the existence of which make his presidential ambitions more unclear than ever. Jose Antonio Vargas at the Washington Post noticed them too, and writes that if Bloomberg wants to look presidential to the sites' users, he has a lot of catching up to do. Not only does he have a total of just 303 supporters on both sites combined (about 300,000 less than Barack Obama), but his profiles are boring. Even Hillary Clinton filled out the interests section! (She's a bad cook but makes a mean scrambled eggs.)
• Rudy Giuliani is looking for a few good ex-City Hall employees to shoot videos promoting his record as mayor, reports the New York Daily News. The goal is to draw a contrast between pre- and post-Giuliani New York. The campaign isn't being picky; they're looking for "other administration officials, community and civic leaders, small business owners, CEOs, current and former elected officials and average New Yorkers" to film video statements about the drop in crime, cleaner streets and parks, and lack of squeegee men after Giuliani arrived. Man, how I miss those squeegee men.
• PrezVid's Peter Hauck views a new Fred Thompson campaign video and finds him relaxed and comfortable. But "if he were any more relaxed, he’d be asleep," writes Hauck. I have to agree; in a completely unrevealing conversation between Thompson and a staffer, Thompson remarks how "certain parts of this country remind me of Tennessee, and the people remind me of Tennesseans. It's just like coming home." Is that where you'd rather be, Fred?
• According to stats provided by Hitwise, one month ago Ron Paul was capturing over 40% of visits to Republican websites. Last week, he was blown out of the water by Fred Thompson, whose site received 55% of visits compared to 20% for Paul. Thompson is also capturing a larger share of the all presidential websites, with almost 35% of the audience share to Barack Obama's 13.5% and Ron Paul's 13%. This is obviously because Thompson announced his candidacy last week; we'll take another look at these numbers next week to see if we can spot a trend.

In Case You Missed It...

Wikipedia is becoming a hub for news and activism among supporters of lower-tier candidates, changing our notions of what an encyclopedia is supposed to do.

Responding to Micah Sifry's post about the Univision Democratic debate, in which Micah couldn't find any Spanish-language follow-up conversation online, Mike Turk notes that the Spanish-language sections of campaign sites rarely get any traffic at all. "The Bush campaign spent a great deal of time and money building out a separate instance of our website with a great deal of content in Spanish only... The net result was the Spanish language portion of the site got almost no traffic at all. Over the course of the entire campaign, it attracted only one contribution through the Spanish language version of our contribution page."

A lively discussion has emerged beneath Jeff Commaroto's second post about the efficacy of campaign bloggers. Much of it centers around the differences between official campaign bloggers (or "spokesbloggers," as David All calls them) and the unofficial group of community bloggers on some sites.