The Web on the Candidates

• Comments from around the web:

  Ben Smith of the Politico: "The web consultant who left Obama's web consulting firm after taking credit for the Vote Different ad has been shadowed in the past by accusations of 'dirty tricks.'"

  Jerome Armstrong at MyDD: "I know the founders of Blue State Digital, and this was a petty move on their part..."

  Hotline On Call: "So -- they fired the guy for creating a creative wonderpiece."

  Todd Ziegler at The Bivings Report: "I’d like to personally thank Huffington for breaking this story. I was suffering from a serious case of parkridge47 overload."

  Chris Cilliza of the Washington Post: "...did the Obama camp get caught playing too cute by half with this video?"

  Brad Levinson from the Beta Stage: If this is 100% true, I can’t imagine how anyone in the Obama camp could have possibly been aware of a side-project that one of their agency’s employees created, especially if the campaign doesn’t even use the firm for video services. Similarly, if this is all true, I don’t even see how BlueStateDigital could have known, or should be responsible for this. To insinuate that the Obama campaign should be held responsible for this (once again, if this is all 100% true) is silly. (Thanks, Todd.)

  Jeff Jarvis: "The video maker quits from a company doing work for Obama. What did they know and when did they know it?"

• "What the Viral Campaign gives, it can take away -- fast," writes Howard Fineman. He thinks we've reached a moment when candidates don't really control their own campaigns; "it is not something they do; it is something that is done to them." The combination of independent big money, an increasingly early primary outcome, and new technologies that let more people contribute to campaigns' messages, means that we're going to see much more like parkridge47's 1984 video. And just as candidates can benefit from these freelance efforts, so too can they be turned against them.
• The "Vote Different" might have changed the nature of the game, but Jon Udell is looking for a different kind of "game-changing behavior." Rather than create propaganda, "we’re now in a position to slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis." Udell even has an idea for how to fund this kind of citizen analysis. "Along with the opt-in $3 Presidential Campaign Fund, let’s have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund. Use the proceeds to collect raw video footage of candidates, and create Mechanical Turk HITs (human intelligence tasks) to parcel out the editing and tagging. If there’s money left over, apply the same treatment to all of the ads."

The Candidates on the Web

• After getting by on what was essentially a placeholder site, Rudy Giuliani launched a new website today. Mike Turk reviews it here.

In Case You Missed It...

Anonymity Sucks
Anonymity in political dialogue should be disavowed by candidates.

ParkRidge47 Mystery Solved by HuffPost
Hat's off to Arianna Huffington and her crew for figuring out who made the "Vote Different" Hillary 1984 video mash-up, and even better for getting Phil de Vellis, its author, to say more about his reasons for making the video.

Presidential Parody '08
Alan Rosenblatt did a quick search on Google for "President 2008" hoping to find a collection of links to the major candidates. After all, some people think the campaign has already started. But instead of finding Hillary, Rudy, Barack, John, and the gang at the top of the free links, I found MyDD, the Polling Report, [Christopher] Walken 2008, and Draft Hillary atop that list, while John, Mitt, Bill (Richardson) showed up in the sponsored links (Hillary did, too, but not her official site).

Twitter Update: Edwards Leads -- Obama and Clinton Follow
Twitter became very popular the past couple of weeks, as all of the A-List bloggers, and folks attending SXSW in Austin started signing up and inviting all of their friends. Because of this, Twitter has proven itself as a great means by which candidates can make connections with potential voters.

ParkRidge47: Not an R, and Not Bill Hillsman
It's become a parlor game for the chattering class: Who is ParkRidge47? TechPresident blogger David All has a great post up on his personal site that, at least for Micah Sifry, pretty definitively closes the door on the author being a mischief-making Republican.

Think Differently
ParkRidge47 melds the medium and the message: Think for yourself. But rejecting the credit for something popular will always makes the MSM suspicious – anyone who refuses a byline must be hiding something.

Hillary Clinton in Second Life
A friend of Ruby Sinreich's has been keeping her up to date on the latest candidate presences in Second Life. They've started visiting them to check them out, and this is the first in a series of reviews she will do of each candidate's virtual headquarters.