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Daily Digest: 9/19/07

BY Joshua Levy | Wednesday, September 19 2007

The Web on the Candidates

  • Harry Shearer -- better known as the voice behind several Simpsons characters and as Spinal Tap's Derek Smalls, my favorite bass player of all time -- is moderating a new, silent kind of debate. In the first round, he pits Mitt Romney against Hillary Clinton, making one rule clear: no talking. As he asks the candidates about topics like Iraq and God, they sit quietly staring at the camera. If it sounds slightly funny, let me assure you -- it's hysterical. Jose Antonio Vargas at the Washington Post has more.
  • Another new online debate forum is set to begin, this time sponsored by MySpace and MTV. Their joint venture, in which the candidates will speak at colleges across the country and answer questions submitted on the web, will kick off next Thursday, September 27th. John Edwards is the first candidate up. We look forward to seeing how this will turn out; hopefully they can learn from the example of the Huffington Post/Slate/Yahoo mashup-thing.
  • Off the Bus, the joint venture from the Huffington Post and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net, is getting a new leader. According to Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland, Journalist Marc Cooper will head up the project, which is using citizen journalism to cover the 2008 election. Cooper "will begin working with approximately 15 'Campaign Correspondents' who've committed to writing twice a week and who will be tracking different issues," HuffPost spokesman Mario Ruiz told Stirland. Although Off the Buss has been off to a somewhat slow start, as the season gathers momentum, and more people start to pay attention, we're sure it will become a go-to source for election coverage.
  • Stirland also reports that Mike Bloomberg supporters are organizing on Facebook to try to convince the NYC mayor to run for president. Right now, only 14 people are slated to show up to a meetup organized by a group of supporters, but on Facebook, these things can explode.

The Candidates on the Web

  • You know someone's running for president when they make an appearance in Second Life. Yes, Newt Gingrich will be showing up in the virtual world on Sept. 27 to host a workshop with his group American Solutions for Winning the Future. It will be held on the virtual West front of the virtual U.S. Capitol, "where 13 years to the day earlier the Contract with America was signed on the steps on the real West end of Capitol." Got that?
  • Last night, Hillary Clinton held an "interactive" Q&A session on her site about her health care plan. The strategy was simple: supporters sent in questions to the campaign and Hillary answered them. Hotline's Athena Jones says the model wasn't really that interactive. "It wasn’t exactly a conversation. Her campaign’s blogger, Crystal Patterson, moderated the forum, reading the questions chosen," Jones wrote. Clinton's use of technology is rarely groundbreaking and keeps expectations low, yet she still seems to be able to use it to appeal to her core supporters -- remember the song contest?
  • The candidate formerly known as...: Dennis Kucinich has a new website, now parked at the Prince-like URL www.dennis4president.com. It certainly looks better than his previous design, which I swear was a relic from the Wayback Machine. The site now sports all kinds of the candidate-site bells and whistles, with Action Center, Dennis Gear, TEXT Dennis, Newsletter Signup, and Photo Gallery buttons prominently displayed in a style reminiscent of, well, every other Democratic candidate site. I do like the big tab at the top that takes you to Kucinich's YouTube page. There's a blog too but, um, "there are no items to display." Come on Dennis, at least welcome us to the new site!

In Case You Missed It...

Chris Dodd, whose web team has been consistently inventing new ways to reach out to supporters, launched a new web campaign yesterday in support of Dodd's Habeus Corpus Restoration Act.

News Briefs

RSS Feed yesterday >

"Power Politics in the Age of Google"

TechPresident's editorial director, Micah Sifry, will be speaking this afternoon on a panel at Harvard University called "Power Politics in the Age of Google," alongside Susan Crawford, Nicco Mele, Elaine Kamarck and Alexis Ohanian. The panel will be moderated by Harvard Shorenstein Center Director Alex Jones, and will be live-streamed here. GO

House Republicans Get a Jump on the Budget

Via Politico's Mike Allen, the House Republicans are out with a video — this one attributed to Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — getting the drop on President Barack Obama's next federal budget, expected Monday. GO

Mittbucks.com Lets Voters Compare Their Paychecks With Romney's

What would it take for Mitt Romney to be able to relate to the average American's daily economic life? He'd have to pay $1,208.09 for a gallon of gas, according to Mittbucks.com, a web site recently created by Adam Rosenscruggs and his wife Danielle in Washington, D.C. The eye-popping figure results from an annual income that I plugged in ... GO

What Twitter Won't Tell You About the Election

A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Tuesday offers the opportunity to get real about what the political conversation on Twitter and Facebook can — or can't — tell you about the progression of the 2012 political campaign. Pew has found that even among users of Twitter and Facebook, a paltry percentage of people use social networks to get news about politics: Only 24 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 25 percent of Facebook users said they "sometimes" got campaign news through that network, while a full 40 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 46 percent of other social media users reported "never" getting campaign news through either Twitter or Facebook. GO

Navigating New York's "Road Map for the Digital City," One Year In

In May 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed a "Road Map for the Digital City," a plan to use technology to make city government more and participatory, and to leverage the city's tech sector for economic and civic gains.

New York City Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne will join our editorial director, Micah Sifry, on a conference call this Friday afternoon to discuss the progress on that road map so far. The call is free and open to anyone to join. You can sign up here.

GO

tuesday >

Pete Hoekstra's Campaign Website's "Offensive" Source Code Changed After Outcry

As if "chop suey fonts" and obvious graphic allusions to the stereotype of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril weren't controversial enough, the group that created an incendiary microsite for former Rep. Pete Hoekstra's campaign has managed to further fan the flames with what it's calling a mistake in its code. GO

Fidel Castro Loves the Internet

“The Internet is a revolutionary instrument that permits the receiving and transmission of ideas, in both directions, that is something we should know how to use,” Fidel Castro told a crowd of supporters on Feb. 4, according to the state-owned Cuban newspaper Granma International. Castro, who made his first public appearance since April 2011, launched his two-volume memoir, “Guerilla of Time,” and took the opportunity to discuss issues of importance to him. Earlier this week, Miranda Neubauer reported that one of these topics was the need for the Internet. Castro has been a proponent of the Internet as a tool for the exchange of ideas since 2003, but the average Cuban citizen faces great difficulty getting online. GO

Claire McCaskill Hires Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner As Digital Director

Missouri's senior Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill has hired Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner as its digital director. GO

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