Daily Digest: Pennsylvania and the Email Blitz

The Web on the Candidates

• The New Republic's Eve Fairbanks profiles Jonathan Schilling, a software developer and the self-appointed caretaker of Hillary Clinton’s Wikipedia entry. But while her and Barack Obama’s pages are hotly contested truth zones, “much of the editing on John McCain’s page these days involves correcting formatting mistakes.” (Thx, IPDI)

• Dante Chinni, Project Director of the Christian Science Montior’s fantastic Patchwork Nation, writes about the campaigns’ well-known strategy of email targeting by location. Focusing on the Clinton and Obama campaigns’ PA strategy, he notices that an Obama email about his community organizing experience in Chicago didn’t make it to Philadelphia inboxes. Maybe they didn’t want to play up racial divisions, he theorizes. And Clinton has been ignoring Philly altogether.

• Yesterday we noted that John McCain had set up a Facebook group encouraging all Republicans. ClickZ’s Kate Kaye (who has been known to post around these parts, too) noted that fellow techPres contributor Patrick Ruffini set up another group to funnel friends over to the official McCain group, in what may be the first political meta-Facebook group. But she wonders what ultimate good more Facebook supporters will do. “Does it really drive more donations or signups or is it just another empty number?,” she asks. It definitely gets us to blog about it.

• Googlebomber Chris Bowers has already written about reviving the search-engine optimization war against John McCain, but yesterday he added that folks should include anti-McCain YouTube videos in the campaign (the idea is that when people search for McCain on Google, these videos will be some of the first results). My vote is to get the McCain Girls high up in those results.

The Candidates on the Web

• A day after launching a new initiative to have a conversation with voters in North Carolina, Hillary Clinton is pushing out a Pennsylvania-focused site. It’s basically a targeted donation page, but you can specify where you’d like your money to go. She’s asking — in a small way — for supporters’ input on how to conduct her campaign. A small but good step.

In Case You Missed It…

In this week's best videos, a McCain girl strikes back; Letterman and McCain jab each other; McCain releases what may be the cheapest political TV ad ever; Gravel goes psychedelic; and more. Also, today marks 40 years since MLK was killed; watch his last speech.

Witnessing Obama’s $40 million haul in March, Patrick Ruffini writes that his campaign has yet to reach the same level of transparency as Howard Dean’s “bat.” Instead, Obama’s “bat” turns out to be an indecipherable mix of real and fake data.

Today, when hooked up to an in-store wifi network, Patrick Ruffini happened upon something pretty interesting: the HillaryClinton.com homepage was geared almost exclusively to the state of Indiana, with no less than four prominent mentions above the fold.

Yesterday North Carolinian airwaves were hit with a new ad from Hillary Clinton heralding the return of Hillary’s “conversation,” the same conversation that she initially promised to have with the American people at the start of her campaign. Unfortunately, it appears to be the kind of one-sided exchange we’ve come to expect from the Clinton campaign.

Yesterday the Obama campaign announced a training program that aims to educate a cadre of activists in the essentials of community organizing, reports Colin Delany. Using Obama’s own organizing experience as a hook, the campaign pitches the Obama Organizing Fellowships as “a program that’s going to train a new generation of leaders — not only to help us win this election, but to help strengthen our democracy in communities across the country.”

Micah Sifry implores you to go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson’s speech on the “Power of information” and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can’t. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.