This morning I reported that John Edwards had launched a competition called “Demand and Be Heard” in which he’s asking supporters to use Eventful to “demand” his appearance in their hometown. This afternoon Edwards released a video describing the competition and inviting his supporters to participate.

(Note the map of New Hampshire in the upper-left corner -- coincidence or deliberate?)

Eventful is unique in that its goal is to help users initiate a true two-way relationship with their candidate; ideally, the people demand an appearance and the candidate obeys the wishes of the people. So far, however, while supporters have set up Eventful demands for most of the candidates, only Ron Paul has actually attended an event created on Eventful, and until now no candidate has directly embraced the site and used it to stimulate a real relationship with his or her supporters.

It looks like Edwards is trying to change that, and if he succeeds to in getting his supporters to participate it will be a new milestone in online politics. But while Edwards is the first to instigate an event using Eventful, with 2,999 demands he trails Barack Obama (24,567), Ron Paul (20,145) and Hillary Clinton (6,319) in the number of demands being made for his appearance. It's unclear why these numbers don't equal the higher numbers of rock bands like Mudvayne, which has 54,415 demands, but it’s possible that voters haven’t bothered to demand candidates’ appearances simply because there hasn’t been evidence that it would have an impact. Edwards' competition would, of course, help to change that perception.

The hard part will be extending participation beyond the Eventful community to the larger community of Edwards supporters. It helps that he's added a "Demand and Be Heard" Eventful widget to his MySpace page; Joe Anthony added a widget to his Obama MySpace page back in February and it caused a spike in demands. In any event (get it?) we’ll be closely watching the competition and Edwards' eventful numbers.