The Web on the Candidates

• There's a new GOP Bloggers straw poll out, and this month Fred Thompson is the conservatives' fave.   However, the Hotline's Blogometer is starting to notice a pattern: "a new name is mentioned, bloggers fall in love, compromising facts are revealed, and a new name is mentioned."  While Thompson came out on top this month, last month it was Rudy Giuliani, in January it was Mitt Romney, and in December it was Newt Gingrich.  Who's your pick for April?
• PrezVid's Peter Hauck links to a remix of Katie Couric's 60 Minutes interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards. The Blue State's Todd Haskins made a montage of Couric's questions, removing the Edwards' responses.  The result makes Couric look particularly aggressive, asking a lot of "Some people say..." questions. 
• The American Spectator's Jennifer Rubin writes that the Hillary Clinton "1984" video was "devastatingly insightful" because although it doesn't teach us something new about Clinton, "it does provoke and give voice to that nagging sense of dissatisfaction among the liberal base that Hillary has gone 'corporate.'  If the ad permeates the cultural zeitgeist, the image of Hillary as 'Big Brother' is going to drown out the 'Go girl!'  message of political groundbreaker and gender champion."  For Rubin, what makes the "1984" video even more effective is that, rather than respond to it, Clinton has continued her one-sided conversation.  "Each overproduced video and news story of her machine-like campaign only serves to reinforce the YouTube message," Rubin says.
• Moveon.org is launching a series of "member-driven Virtual Town Hall events with Presidential candidates" that are intended to introduce their members to the candidates, and the candidates to their members.  The first Town Hall will be held on April 10th, and people will be able to participate online or on Air America, which is broadcasting the event.  The questions will be submitted and selected by their members,  who will be polled afterward about which candidate they're most excited about.  This should be an interesting event.  More details to come...    
• There have been followup posts to our piece about Barack Obama's inflated YouTube numbers from PrezVid, The Caucus, and The Politico.

The Candidates on the Web

• In a twist on Howard Dean's baseball bat and the omnipresent fundraising thermometer, Bill Richardson is using a hot pepper to gauge the progress towards his end-of-quarter fundraising goal of $500,000.  Right now, about a third of the pepper is red, yet it corresponds to almost $250,000, half of his goal...  I like the pepper; it pays tribute to Richardon's Hispanic background and it's playful.  Let's see how hot it gets... 
• Following in the footsteps of Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, and Al Gore, Barack Obama has posed a question on Yahoo! Answers, reports the Chicago Tribune.  His question? "How can we engage more people in the democratic process?"  So far the question has received over 8700 answers.  The Tribune notes that Obama isn't the first candidate to use the forum; Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been there, done that.
  

In Case You Missed It...

Good Advice For Candidates
A friend sent Mike Turk a link to a very good post on how PR firms should approach bloggers. It's sort of a "what to and not to do list". While aimed at people doing corporate PR, it is certainly applicable to campaigns as well.

The New Political Multiplier
So Obama got 2.7 million or so views on YouTube since last week compared to second place Hillary’s 78,000 total views. This much we know. Are the numbers fishy? Perhaps. On the other hand, it is possible the 320,000+ members of the One Million Strong for Obama Facebook community each viewed an average of nine Obama videos this week. It is not impossible.

Tancredo's missed opportunity
Michael Turk dug in deep earlier looking at Tom Tancredo's new website - TeamTancredo.com. And David All was simply going to comment, but this has turned in to a rather lengthy post on how a candidate like Tanc is missing opportunities by having a shoddy web operation.

Duncan Hunter’s broadband bypass strategy
Duncan Hunter's campaign team has come to a few realizations: He's not the front-runner. He can't command media attention like some of the other nominees. And his biggest strength is his unique blend of being both a populist and a conservative.

YouTube Gets Pwned: Obama's Numbers Don't Add Up
In the last couple of weeks Barack Obama’s YouTube numbers have absolutely skyrocketed. With over 2,700,000 views of Obama's channel as of this writing, he has almost 35 times the number of views as Hillary Clinton, who comes in second at over 78,000 (in the last couple of days Obama's numbers seemed to stopped climbing completely -- has YouTube capped the number of views?) and his number of views have risen by almost 2000% in the last week.

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