A connection between the Romney campaign and an anti-Fred Thompson website; the College Republicans are encouraging their minions to use YouTube; Mike Bloomberg's social networking profiles have been slow to take off; Rudy Giuliani is looking for ex-employees to shoot promo videos; Fred Thompson is out with a new and slow campaign video; and Hitwise stats show a huge market share for Thompson's website.

Harry Shearer moderates the hysterical silent debate; MySpace and MTV kick off their presidential forum series with John Edwards next week; Marc Cooper heads the Off the Bus team; Bloomberg for Prez supporters organize on Facebook; Newt shows up in Second Life; Hillary Clinton hosts an "interactive" webcast that's not quite interactive; and Dennis Kucinich sports a new website, bringing him firmly in step with the 21st century.

Is it me, or are the citizen-filmmakers of the world getting behind? This week, only one citizen-created video — the George Bush gender bender clip — caused much of a stir. Most of the other notable vids were either clips taken off of TV, or well-produced campaign ads like John Edwards’ “The Politics of Parsing.” While some campaigns are starting to produce better videos, it’s now up to you, the voters, to counter back with your own work.

If you have a video you think we should seee, drop us a line at info AT techpresident DOT com.

Whither third parties and independents in 2008? Unity08 is fading, as expected. But Bloomberg may yet run, if the conditions are right. With the right message, he could even go all the way.

The Internet lets us be armchair pundits like never before; it's official: it's no longer cool to be a presidential candidate who's ignorant about technology; jymomma4obama gets the text out; Googlebombing from the right; Google Trends points to Obamentum; a new widget shows the candidates' fundraising hauls; Mike Bloomberg is NOT running for president; Obama has the most complete graphic design package around.

Obama's neglect of the netroots bores progressive bloggers; Obama's broad coalition of supporters, cultivated online, may negate the need for the netroots; dueling "red telephone" ads and a much-needed parody; six seconds of silence on a Clinton campaign call; a new aggregation site has a misleading about page; what if Bloomie were stilling running?; and Off The Bus profiles a whopping 200 superdelegates.

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).

Our cousins across the pond continue to show that "government 2.0" isn't just something that we have to do "to" government, but it's something government can do "with" us. The Power of Information Task Force has just launched a contest called "Show Us a Better Way" that is calling for "ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated." They've put up 20,000 pounds for the winning idea, which is something like a gazillion dollars (these days). This is really kewl.

I'm in Austin, Texas for the Netroots Nation conference today and tomorrow, and will try to do some live video interviews as I bump into people and post them here. I'm speaking tomorrow on a panel on "Transparency, Participation and Reinvention in Government in the Next Administration Through Web 2.0 Tools and Culture," which I think could have had the shorter title of "Rebooting Government in 2009" but you get the drift.

Apps for Democracy is a remarkable contest for software developers launched by the city government of Washington DC. The challenge? Build applications for Facebook, iPhones, Google Maps, and more that make the lives of DC citizens better. And do it while making use of the city's rich data catalog, which contains structured data on everything from ongoing construction projects to crime reports to sites along the African American Heritage Trail. Up for grabs is $20,000 in prize money, including two $500 people's choice awards voted on by fellow coders.