Daily Digest: They Look Like Facebook

The Web on the Candidates

• DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas has announced he’ll be covering the 2008 presidential campaign for Newsweek. He assures his ideological opponents in “wingnutlandia” that “Newsweek is ‘balancing’ me out with someone that should make heads on our side explode.” Ed Morrissey at the conservative Captain's Quarters writes that his head has failed to explode. He calls the move "a positive step forward for the blogosphere," and is encouraging his readers to come up with a suitable match for Markos who "can burst open heads with tough-minded conservative rhetoric." Maybe we in the blogosphere should do our part and get Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann to blog at techPresident…

• Earlier this week techPresident’s Zephyr Teachout asked for help in crafting a response to the “1% problem” — the report that “Only 1% of Presidential race coverage was focused on record and past performance of candidates.” Now she’s published that letter at the Huffington Post, giving campaign reporters five suggestions for how to improve their coverage, from exploring the candidates’ past positions on issues (gasp!) to using original images NOT supplied by the campaigns (horror!) to not focusing solely on poll results (eek!). “We rely on you deeply—perhaps more than you are comfortable with,” she tells the boys and girls on the bus.

• The folks at Why Tuesday caught up with Meetup.com CEO Scott Heiferman, who sorta, kinda spilled a couple of tiny little beans about an top-secret project to launch later this year. “It will help larger movements coordinate themselves into a real movement… how do local groups who might be primarily about different things coordinate around some common cause or common interest?” Heiferman rhetorically asked. We’re excited to find out what the heck he’s talking about.

• TinyURL.com — the popular site that let’s you mash long, complicated web addresses into tidy little URLs — is openly trumpeting its support for Ron Paul via a “We Support Ron Paul” badge in the top right of the screen. Friend-of-techPrez and progressive “interwebologist” Michael Whitney (the brain behind our Politickr feature) noticed the odd revelation and isn’t impressed. “Do you want your abbreviated URLs to come from a site that doesn’t want to abolish the IRS and pretty much all of the federal government?” he asks. If you’d prefer not to indirectly support Paul by crunching your URLs with the service, Michael provides alternative address-abbreviating sites.

• In reaction to dismissive comments about Facebook and Barack Obama (Obama supporters “look like Facebook”) from Hillary Clinton advisors Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald, it appeared that angry voters had created a new Facebook group. Sounds simple, right? Actually, the group was created by techPresident contributor and Republican web consultant Patrick Ruffini, which makes it more of an ideological protest against her candidacy. Kudos to Patrick for stealthily getting the word out; the group has 576 members (many of whom are not Republicans), and the Politico’s Ben Smith, who first reported the group, didn’t see Ruffini’s hand until RedState’s Mike Krempasky noted it in the comments.

• Future Majority’s Mike Connery thinks the Clinton campaign’s comments about young voters and charges of question-planting reveals “an utter lack of respect for the role of young people in our political process.” But the progressive Connery worries that these revelations won’t affect Clinton’s chances. “This is just so much inside baseball to the race,” he writes, “and none but the most committed voters, who follow all of the inside baseball, will ever hear about this.”

• Rocketboom’s Joanne Colan stopped by techPresident central last week to ask us about 10Questions (Rocketboom is a co-sponsor). Funnily enough, we made it into yesterday’s episode. Watch as Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej describe the ideas behind 10Questions and I sit between them, silent but deadly.

In Case You Missed It…

With one day to go in Round One of 10Questions, we prepare for the candidates’ responses in Round Two, and developer David Colarusso gets some love from the press.

Colin Delany reports from the front of the continuing email death match between the GOP and the Democrats. Yesterday, the GOP struck with a quite clever message from e-campaign director Cyrus Krohn hitting Hillary over the head about the release of Clinton presidential records. What will be the Democratic counter-response?

Zephyr Teachout alerts us to the 1.0 release of Miro, the new open-source video player that she calls “the town square of the future.”