It's been a busy week in the 2008 presidential campaign--Hillary Clinton launched her online "conversation" (see David Weinberger's spot-on critique) and went to Iowa; John Edwards also did an online video web-chat that he calls a "live online discussion"; Barack Obama laid low and let the explosive growth of one unofficial Facebook group (now at more than 158,000 members) speak for him; and Bill Richardson formally announced his campaign launch.

Welcome to our new group blog on how the presidential campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them, TechPresident.com. This blog is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, our online zine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. Over there, we'll continue to cover all the ways the political arena is being reshaped by new tools and practices born on the web, while over here we're going to drill down on what the presidential campaigns are doing online, and vice-versa, how bottom-up initiatives launched by ordinary people, what we call voter-generated content, are going to impact the campaign.

What happened to Hillary Clinton's friends on MySpace.com? A day ago, she had about 22,000; now her site lists only 12,177. For a couple of hours today, if you tried to go to http://www.myspace.com/hillaryclinton2008, you saw this:

My parents always taught me that you can learn a lot about a person by looking at the people with whom they choose to associate. It's something I have always believed. It is, however, something that is being tossed on its ear by social networking sites.

My question has been, and remains, what do your MySpace or Facebook friends say about you? Will campaigns be judged on the people they publicly affiliate with via social networking sites? Most importantly, will the media care?

Most mentions of social networking focus on the number of friends a candidate has, but nobody seems to care about the people that make up that number?

We're pleased to announce our newest feature: Technorati tracks, a series of dynamic charts that show how often bloggers are mentioning the presidential candidates over the last 30 and 90 days. The charts are broken down by party, and we've also included a third set showing how bloggers are also talking about prominent non-candidates like Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Wesley Clark and Michael Bloomberg.

You may have noticed that Dennis Kucinich seems to have gained a lot of MySpace friends in the last day (I know you've been watching those numbers like a hawk). It's not because Kucinich has suddenly become a social networking phenomenon. Instead, we were informed that he has another, official, profile that is more popular than the profile we were linking to.

I have noticed that my list of MySpace friends doesn't grow linearly. You can't just go to the last page of your "friends" to see who's added themselves to your train.

New "friends" seem to get added and sorted at random. I am assuming it is a ruse used to maximmize pageviews and thusly ad revenue. Still, it lends itself for some unplanned and quite humorous comingly of people who may have never met outside your list.

John McCain's MySpace pages have disappeared. His most popular profile -- the profile we've been linking to for our MySpace charts -- has apparently been deleted.

Following up on Josh's post, McCain's new myspace page is up. It'll look remarkably familiar to you if you've been to his official website.

It took just a few hours, but at the moment it looks like the same grass-roots army that has been showing up online and on the streets for Barack Obama has also swung into gear on Eventful.com's new Politics page.