The Web on the Candidates

• Taking a cue from a question he was asked at the Politics Online conference last week, Jerome Armstrong offers a "succinct guide for doing R&D in the campaign" on MyDD. The top three suggestions: "look out onto the Internet for what's being done... in order to create innovation, look out at what's happening in areas outside of political campaign websites."; "don't try everything, less is more... doing one thing right, instead of a dozen things half-assed, makes the difference between a signal getting through and clutter lost in the shuffle."; and "work with the brand that is your candidate."
• Another Politics Online post-mortem: Alex Clover from the Bivings Report lists his highlights from last week's Politics Online conference, which include Jerome Armstrong on Second Life, Giuliani advisor Patrick Ruffini on online only-events, Chuck DeFeo of Townhall (and now of techPresident) on "flooding the zone," and Joe Trippi on the end of big money. It's another great synopsis of this year's conference.
• Amy Schatz of The Wall Street Journal wrote about who's winning the "Internet primary" so far, and how the web is the focus of candidates' tactics this year. Her data comes from a DailyKos poll and, of course, techPresident's MySpace friend charts.
• The Hotline on Call offers some snippets from Barack Obama's appearance on Larry King Live last night, including this response the hot pro-Obama/anti-Clinton "1984" ad that even NBC Nightly News can't ignore: "We knew nothing about it. I just saw it for the first time. And, you know, one of the things about the Internet is that people generate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, it's the democratization of the campaign process. But it's not something that we had anything to do with or were aware of and that frankly, given what it looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something like that. It's pretty extraordinary."
• Speaking of that video, Adam Conner from RunObama.com gives an "anatomy" of the 1984 video explosion, from the first time it appeared a couple of weeks ago to the MSM's recent discovery of it. He traces the video's explosion in popularity from its appearance in the blogosphere on March 5, when MyDD, Talkingpointsmemo (and techPresident) linked to it, through Micah Sifry's look at "Who is ParkRidge47,," to its appearance on an Apple tech blog, to the eventual, inevitable conclusion: a mention in a column by Joe Klein.

The Candidates on the Web

• Sam Brownback web site hasn't changed much since I first started looking at it (though it did finally change its url to something resembling the candidate's name, which is good), but it recently added a feature that at least gives it the illusion of being dynamic: rollovers! Under a headline that reads, "Principled. Conservative. Republican.," sit six thumbnail images, each representing an issue: Rebuilding the Family, Renewing the Culture, Growing the Economy, Defending Freedom, Protecting Life, and Energy Independence. When you roll over each thumbnail you see a set of bullet points about each issue. It's a quick way to glance the Brownback's positions, but it's, well, not very exciting. When most of the top-tier candidates feature at least something in the way of video -- at this point, even Ron Paul has videos on YouTube -- this kind of old-school site design doesn't offer the insight into a candidate we've come to expect.

In Case You Missed It...

A cookie here, a cookie there, malicious spyware everywhere?
Last week at the IPDI Conference in Washington, DC, the keynote address was offered by Elliot Schrage, the VP of Global Communications & Public Affairs for Google.

In his address, he noted that the "downside of access is intrusion" and suggested that this could be the year that a candidate is found using some form of malicious spyware to collect more information about its visitors.

Disco Rudy Grooves on Second Life [UPDATE]
No presidential candidate has officially jumped into the Second Life ring just yet, but volunteer supporters of John Edwards and Barack Obama have constructed simple spots to promote their candidate. And no one has constructed an anti-candidate site... until now.

The McCain Show
When David All first read about John McCain's plan to create a "reality-type" TV show for his campaign, he was more than a little interested in seeing how it turned out.

Breaking News: The Barocket Takes Off on YouTube
Barack Obama is taking off like a rocket in the video-sphere, judging by the number of views his YouTube channel has garnered in the last 48 hours. Just take a look at our chart: After slowly rising in the last week to about 100,000 views, his site has shot through the roof, passing 400,000 in the last day. Everybody else is relatively flat.