Credit: Forty

The Phoenix-based marketing firm Forty has posted a walk-through of just went into the revamping of John McCain's website for his upcoming Senate race. Here's the new site, and here's what the old one looked like. For the design and process geeks among us, these insights into how projects go from conception stage to implementation out in the actual world are like candy. Or bacon, depending on where your tastes lay. More please.

James Richardson, former RNC e-campaign staffer, asks the somewhat obvious question in the face of Obama's "admission" -- truthful or otherwise -- that his thumbs are simply too dang large to allow him to type on his Blackberry. Were the Obama campaign ads that mocked John McCain as a tech-illiterate fogey really, really out of line? Whether or not you actually believed until now that Obama was the force behind the White House Twitter account, his reaction to the question about Twitter during a townhall in Shanghai draws an inevitable comparison between himself and how candidate McCain was framed during the course of the '08 general election. You might remember that, even at the time, one high-profile Democrat thought the that the Obama campaign's clip, called Still, was "terrible": a silver fox by the name of Joe Biden.

For whatever reason, Obama has on at least on a handful of occasions exhibited an overwhelming compulsion to hold himself out as dismissive of new technologies, even as he makes good use of them. Case in point, when he was asked during an online townhall about the potential economic impact of legalizing marijuana. He joked, "I don't know what this says about the online audience, but..." Why does he do it? Dunno.

To a web designer, IA stands for Information Architect. To a busload of Obama campaigners bound for swing states, IA meant Iowa. Thankfully, Scott Thomas, the former Design Director for the Obama election web site, was on hand to bridge that gap in the months leading up to last November 4th.

Within a week of polling day, Thomas had boarded a plane for Japan, to rest his eyes from screen diagrams, escape from the 24-7 network news treadmill and spouting election coverage. Little did he realize he'd stepped right into a country where the leading cigarette brand is called Hope and every storefront was plastered with billposters of domestic electoral candidates, with way worse graphics than those he'd overseen back home.

Last week, Thomas, who is launching a new book project, Designing Obama, presented to the Interaction Design graduate students at the School of Visual Arts here in New York city, not just to share his vacation photos of Tokyo, but to share lessons from the preceding months designing and endlessly refining what showed up on browsers for Barack.

The Senator from Arizona, up for re-election in 2010, emails to note that he's relaunched his JohnMcCain.com site. There are signs that McCain has picked up a few tricks of late. The first is that his announcement email was just a few compact paragraphs, rather than the "Tolstoy in my inbox" of past missives. And the new site's Social Network tab features a pre-packaged tweet that you can use to post a note of support to Twitter. McCain has actually been one of the more accessible, human, and enjoyable politicians to take to Twitter.

Some things don't change, though. McCain still loves him a black website background. Maybe it's not a style choice, though. Maybe it's part of his energy conservation plan.

If most media outlets covering the presidential campaigns had anything to say about it, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and other social media phenomena would get all the credit for making 2008 the most digital election ever. But that’s only part of the web story. Surely no campaign staffer worth his salt would deny the potential impact of a Barack Obama supporter posting a link on her Facebook page to the candidate’s site. However, the fact is many of the campaigns used a far more measurable online campaign tactic: paid online advertising.

As early as January 2007, candidates still in the exploratory stages had begun buying ad space on the Web. Granted, they spent little compared to what they allocated to television ads or even to Web site building and management. Still, Web ads enabled them to drive potential supporters to their sites in the hopes of getting them to sign up for e-mails, attend a house party, volunteer, or donate a few bucks. And through the use of contextual placements, online ads also were also useful in reinforcing campaign messages. Longtime friend of PdF and techPres, Kate Kaye, has a new book out, “Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,” that tells the story. It's a terrific guide to one of the least-covered but significant aspects of the campaign of 2008, the online ad wars--and no one covered this terrain more closely that Kate, as veterans of both the Obama and McCain campaigns attest. Anyone who is looking to use targeted advertising in their own political efforts online should get a copy.

• Not to be cowed by Organizing for America's 13-million-member or so mailing list, John McCain stepped into the fray yesterday with an email to his list on the stimulus package before Congress...
• We may never know what role, if any, the Tom Daschle YouTube video that burned up the Intertubes yesterday had in his withdrawal as HHS nominee. But woowee, it couldn't have helped...
• With Daschle out of the running, there's a been a renewed push in what is perhaps best called the progressive blogosphere to install former DNC chair Howard Dean at the helm of Health and Human Services...
• Recovery.gov, the much-anticipated oversight site tracking the payouts from the $900 billion stimulus package currently before Congress, has been dropped from the Senate version of the bill, Is it time to start worrying?...
• And even more.

Presidential silver medalist John McCain jumped back into the political fray yesterday with the launch of a "grassroots organization" called Country First...Speaking of the PACs you launch after you don't quite make it to the White House, Democracy for America -- the organization that grew out of Howard Dean's presidential run -- is putting some pressure on his apparent successor as Democratic National Committee Chairman...It's worth reading the L.A. Times' Kate Linthicum's interview with Scott Goodstein, who headed up the text messaging program for the Obama campaign, just to hear what question prompted this answer: "South Carolina. Oprah Winfrey"...and more.

(Crossposted from ClickZ.)

Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million. Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.

The half dozen contenders for the post of RNC chairman gathered yesterday for an event that was threaded through with what might fairly be called an obsession with technology...When we discussed a report in the New York Times yesterday that Barack Obama would finally (cue whiny voice) be naming a Chief Technology Officer this Wednesday, we commented, "we'll see." Well, looks like we won't...The Obama transition has gone down a somewhat different road than Bill Clinton in revealing its donors -- though, of course, the motivations and expectations are entirely different...and more.

FOX 5 of Washington D.C. went to the McCain/Palin campaign fire sale in Arlington, Virginia on Thursday and purchased a couple of dead Blackberries. After powering them up with new batteries, the reporters found that normal security protocols that should have been adhered to by the campaign to remove data from the devices had been glossed over. They found them full of confidential campaign contact information as well as some e-mail.