The Web on the Candidates

• In a fantastic cover story for the National Journal (newly redesigned!), Ronald Brownstein writes that “the marathon struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton has triggered such a vast evolutionary leap in the way candidates pursue the presidency that it is likely to be remembered as the first true 21st-century campaign.” To Brownstein, these changes are rooted in a “fusion of passion and technology.” Beyond the important insights Browstein makes, look for cameos by techPresident’s Micah Sifry and Patrick Ruffini, along with other smart people like New Politics Institute’s Peter Leyden and former Howard Dean and John Edwards advisor Joe Trippi. Add this one to the required reading list.

• We’ve long been fans of Eventful, which has added a major new dimension to the 2008 campaigns by letting supporters “demand” that candidates appear in their towns (a big moment last year involved John Edwards showing up in a Kentucky town of 290 people). Now they’re focusing on local campaigns. They’ve integrated demands into Republican Pat McCrory’s event listings, and Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer is featuring an Eventful widget on her site. Great stuff — and part of the future of local online campaigning.

• MoveOn.org, which has officially endorsed Barack Obama, is gathering signatures on a petition attempting to shame ABC about this week’s debate. “Enough with the distractions—ABC and other networks must focus on issues that affect people’s daily lives,” it writes. Obama’s camp is also using the debate — and his rough performance — to raise money. Since Obama supporters are up in arms and inundating ABC with emails and outrage, it’s not a bad fountain to tap.

• Global Voices co-founder and geek/activist Ethan Zuckerman is one of our favorite bloggers, both for his inimitable ability to liveblog conferences and his wide-ranging commentary on technology, human rights, and even sauna-building. He’s also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and this past week, they took a break from subjects like Chinese dissident bloggers to discuss… YouTube videos! Right up our alley. Once David Weinberger shared his favorite Mike Gravel video things spiraled into the coolest show-and-tell ever. Most of the videos Zuckerman mentions will be familiar to readers of the blog, but his commentary is, as always, priceless.

• Roy Edroso, writing for long-time liberal New York mag the Village Voice, isn’t happy that the 2008 campaign is an unavoidable subject, or that bloggers will continue to invade his brain all year long. But there’s no stopping it, so he provides a guide to the conservative bloggers that “are likely to invade your casual conversations until the gruesome finale of our Celebration of Democracy drives us all back to our blessed, customary ignorance.” The list includes superheroes like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Charles Johnson, and Michelle Malkin.

• According to a poll from Pittsburgh-based CivicScience, web-savvy Pennsylvanians are supporting Barack Obama by a margin of 24 points. As in the rest of the country, we web-only poll leaves out a significant chunk of voters, but it’s a huge margin nonetheless. (via Tech Daily Dose)

• When I’m back in my home state of Vermont, as I am now for the Passover holiday, it’s always nice to flip through the local paper to see what passes for news in the small, rural state. And one article today is just so Vermont-esque, I couldn’t possibly make it up: The Vermont Teddy Bear Company is producing teddy-bear versions of the candidates. The best part? “Since they were launched on Monday, the presidential candidate bears have been the buzz of national and state blogs.” Yeah, all week it’s been nothing but bears, bears, bears on Technorati.

The Candidates on the Web

• More Twitter, more of the time: techPresident contributor David All spoke to David Almacy, the man behind the White House’s official Twitter feed. While the POTUS tweet consists of little more than RSS feeds, it’s something.

• The POTUS tweet doesn’t compare to the output of his cross-Atlantic cohort. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is now tweeting as well, with the Guardian giving credit to his new head of communications, Mark Flanagan. With Brown in the U.S. to meet with Bush, do you think they’ll trade secrets on which Twitter clients to use? (Brown: “I’m all about Twhirl. It uses Adobe AIR technology to bridge online and offline data.” Bush: “Yeah, but Twitterific fits better into the Mac OSX environment.”)

In Case You Missed It…

In this week’s favorite videos, the campaigns get creative and retro, with Nader, Clinton, and Obama producing new campaign ads; Eyeblast.tv offers a retrospective of voter-generated video; and Baracky rises from the streets of, er, Philly to the halls of Washington.

Micah Sifry and Mike Turk are still in London, liveblogging and “pre-liveblogging” the sessions and their own keynotes at the Politics Web 2.0 conference. It looks like they’re having a great time, and you should all be jealous.

From Obama’s “bitter” brouhaha to making new rules for the superdelegates, Internet activists are upending this presidential campaign, writes Ari Melber, working the online politics beat at the Nation.

A new initiative from an Obama supporter is seeking to raise a million bucks in a minute for Barack. Can he do it?