Daily Digest: Hillary's Fact Hub: Own that Message!

The Web on the Candidates

• The YearlyKos moniker is no more. Gina Cooper, who started as a diarist on DailyKos and ended up being the driving force behind the conference that took its name, has announced that YearlyKos is now Netroots Nation. The name change alludes to YK’s growth as it’s become much more than a yearly conference. Netroots Nation will also “give progressive activists the tools they need to hold elected leaders of all stripes accountable and ultimately see a new progressive agenda enacted.” The new org’s team includes former Barack Obama deputy director of new media Josh Orton, who left the campaign earlier this year.

• Women vote more than men, and campaigns are fighting more and more for their support (witness the indirect attacks on Hillary Clinton from Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards). To help get empower even more women to vote, Women’s Voices. Women Vote has released a cool widget, that presents a short video message directed to single women voters and a link to register to vote. Viewers don’t even have to go to another site to register — both the video and the voter registration form (courtesy of the Rock the Vote) are layered on top of the current page. As we know from Tyra Banks’ experience (yes, that Tyra Banks), these things can work.

• The data-crunchers at Compete have posted a new mini-study showing which states are most “tuned-in” to the to the election, “as gauged by the percentage of people in each state who visited either a candidate’s website or a top political blog during the month.” The results: Suprise! The top states are New Hampshire and Iowa. One interesting fact: Idaho ranks as the fourth most tuned-in state, perhaps due to Senator Larry Craig’s lavatorial indiscretions.

The Candidates on the Web

• Hillary Clinton has launched a new rapid-response site called The Fact Hub that continues her practice of using the web only for the most top-down, message-controlling behavior. Now, every time an unfriendly story appears in the press, a refutation is quickly posted at Fact Hub (the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg picked up on one of the first uses of the site, to push back on a claim that Clinton stiffed an Iowa diner on a $157 bill). Like the rest of Hillary’s campaign, the site is sharp and on-message.

• But is this hyper-controlled strategy an effective use of the web? Champlain College professor Elaine Young, who’s been following the campaign’s use of the web, poses some important questions. “What is more powerful? Controlling the message or allowing others to run with the message?,” she asks. There’s a huge difference between Clinton’s Web 1.0 style to Ron Paul’s embrace of distributed energy, and the latter is arguably more efficient at using the web to get the message out.

In Case You Missed It…

In this week’s list of favorite videos, a handful of campaign-produced videos make the cut and only one creative citizen-produced video is grabbing attention. Are the campaigns getting better at this stuff?

John Edwards and Ron Paul have both signed on to 10Questions! We’re confident that the other candidates will soon follow their lead.

An event starring both Max Cleland and Karl Rove on the same stage — to talk about online politics, no less — is almost too bizarre for words. Nevertheless, Michael Bassik reviews yesterday’s “The Rise of Citizen 2.0” event, sponsored by Yahoo. But Michael didn’t think he was the intended audience. “Those who would find this presentation helpful are those who still think internet users are 12-year-old kids in their mother’s basement posting visceral blog comments in virtual echo chambers,” he writes.

Jeff Commaroto expands on a recent New York Times piece about the unintended consequences of online advertising for candidates. The problem is that networks and technologies that are meant to directly target voters are still being born and perfected.

Huckwatcher Zephyr Teachout writes that Mike Huckabee supporters, responding to Ron Paul’s fundraising success this week, have scheduled their own big day. The goal, however, is more modest than Paul’s: $1 million in one day.