The Web on the Candidates

• Blaming "Bill Donohue and his calvacade of right wing shills," embattled blogger Amanda Marcotte resigned from the John Edwards campaign yesterday.
• Is Marcotte a casualty of the boring-down of campaign bloggers? Daniel Drezner thinks they're "little more than good PR stylists." Danny Glover goes further with the thread and considers Zack Exley's point about politicians writing their own blogs. However, if we're talking about the problem of boring and restrained blogging, "Exley is living in a fantasy world if he thinks politicians are going to be much more open on their blogs than their hired hands. That won't happen as long as bloggers unrestrained by campaigns parse every word for hidden (and often imagined) meanings."
• ZDNet's Larry Dignan welcomes Barack Obama to the web -- a place where, in Obama's case, your site "only plays video in IE, social media features stumbled on day one and you can't import previous political blog posts."
• Campaigns are struggling to balance the openness and social nature of the Web 2.0 with the need to control the message. The big questions is "how do you leverage Web 2.0 and true communities online while maintaining some control over your candidate," says Julie Barko Germany.

The Candidates on the Web

• Chris Dodd, who continues to quietly make good use of the social web, has launched a new web site, Restore-Habeas.org, to promote his Restoring the Consitution Act of 2007, a proposed bill that will "restore Habeas Corpus protections to detainees, bar information acquired through torture from being introduced as evidence in trials, and limit presidential authority to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions." The site features a YouTube video of Dodd explaining the act and encourages viewers to film their own clips explaining why they (presumably) agree.
• Bill Richardson's site continues to trumpet Richardson's accomplishments, still lacks any sense of a community beyond links to his favorite social web sites.
• Sam Brownback, can still be found (or not) at http://www.t-worx.com/Default.aspx?alias=www.t-worx.com/brownback, has not updated his site since he announced his candidacy.
• Tom Vilsack started off nicely with a video of his DNC Winter Meeting speech and viewer comments on the front page of his site, but he hasn't posted anything since. A simple blog will do; no need to make it only a video blog!
• Dennis Kucinich posted a new video on his vlog discussing his plan to end the war in Iraq. It's a direct and personal approach that lacks that bizarre framing of some of his earlier videos.

Hillary's blog countdown

• Twenty-two days: no blog from Chappaqua.