Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) launches his presidential bid this morning and according to Beth Fouhy of the Associated Press, the longtime senator will announce his candidacy via online video to supporters.

While in Iowa this weekend, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) was caught on microphone singing the national anthem out of tune, reports the New York Times' Patrick Healy. The new media that sparked a "conversation" about her announcement message quickly turned on her as the video made it to YouTube within hours.

Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) launched his presidential campaign, via web video, in a hail of controversy regarding comments he made in reference to fellow Democrat, Senator Barack Obama (IL). Within hours, the audio of his remarks made it to YouTube, as did a clip of FOX News -- no stranger to an Obama controversy -- airing Biden's clarification. The senator later joked about it with The Daily Show host, Jon Stewart. (Video here.)

In South Carolina, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is determined to win as he picked up the support of forty State House members -- all caught on video -- via Laurin Manning of South Carolina '08.

TPMCafe's Election Central has video highlights from six possible Democratic presidential hopefuls from the Democratic National Committee's Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C. Among the official, exploring, or rumored candidates: Senators Christopher Dodd (CT), Hillary Clinton (NY), Barack Obama (IL), John Edwards (NC), Congressman Dennis Kucinich (OH) and retired General Wes Clark (AR). ABC's Political Punch has more, including a podcast from the DNC meeting.
Obama (D-IL) drew over "3,000 mostly sign-waving students" in Virginia, notes New York Times political blogger, Sarah Wheaton. The event was sponsored by the George Mason University chapter of Students for Barack Obama, a national, student-based grassroots organization. The group used Facebook, a social networking favorite among college students, to handle RSVPs for the February 2 appearance. More from the Associated Press here.

As more and more candidates declare their intention to run for president in 2008, more and more Americans will turn to search engines like Google and Yahoo! to find their websites.

So, at a minimum, I expected all 17 of the presumed candidates to have purchased keywords. To my chagrin, only six candidates have taken the plunge. And if you take a closer look, it’s the Republicans who are doing a significantly better job of using search to communicate with the electorate...

This weekend I took an hour to review all the candidates sites as if I were coming to them ignorant -- simply using the web (as many will) to decide who to support. I assumed that I would start trying to figure out, "why are they running for President?" and then dig deeper. I did not use the bio sections of the site, but the structure and initial text. This is the superficial first pass. What, in two words, is the core message of each site?

The Web on the Candidates

Just after techPresident's Jack McEnany posted a review of Mike Huckabee's exploratory site, the site went down (must be all that techPresident traffic!). Upon finding a Go Daddy parked url in the place of Huckabee's site, Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Report wrote, "This is the kind of message you get when (a) your site isn't done yet and you are parking a URL you bought on GoDaddy or (b) you go over your bandwidth limit for the month and haven't put in more cash." The site, up now, was down for at least an hour.

Over at PrezVid, Jeff Jarvis catches up with Iain Dale, creator of 18 Doughty Street, a conservative British Internet TV channel. Jarvis posted a video in which he and Dale chat about American presidential candidates' use of video ("He says Clinton’s Hillcasts are just pieces to camera; 'she’s not interacting with people, she’s talking at them.' He says that Obama’s site is fresh; I say he’s not saying [anything] but Dale argues 'you don’t have to say much; David Cameron didn’t say much' at the start of a campaign... He advises that candidates should not (like McCain) make their videos too slick. And if candidates have blogs, they should join in personally sometimes. 'You’ve got to personalize it.'"). Definitely a site to keep an eye on.

The Web on the Candidates

When the election is over, will the candidates keep Twittering? Marianne Richmond of Blog the Campaign in 08 wants to know. "So what happens when the election is over? "Do the candidates that get eliminated upon the way, close up social media shop?," she wonders, daydreaming about the first executive order: "Please cancel my MySpace account, Facebook, and Twitter accounts..."

Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Report takes on IPDI's choice of nominees for their annual Golden Dot award for online politician of the year. The nominees for the award are Ned Lamont, Mark Warner, Dick DeVos, and Jack Kingston. As Ziegler points out, only one of these nominees actually won an election. "Three of the four nominees did not achieve the office they sought and are being nominated for losing with style. Winning was not a consideration in putting together this list. I could understand including one or two politicians who lost (avoiding the word "losers" here), but three?" he writes. He agrees with techPresident's Mike Turk, who recently wondered "What is [the candidates'] strategy to win? What are their obstacles? How will their online campaign help seal the deal on Election Day? Most of the Presidential campaigns have not, at least to the casual observer, answered those questions. Looking at their sites, you have no idea how their web operation is going to move them toward the goal of actually getting votes."

Democratic Presidential Candidate Chris Dodd hits it out of the park with his appearance on Jon Stewart.

The Web on the Candidates

Under pressure from the Moveon and netroots bloggers, including dailykos' Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and myDD's Matt Stoller, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled a planned Democratic debate from Fox News, Ryan Grim from the Politico reports. Grim writes that although Democratic leaders have publicly blamed comments from Fox President in which he jokingly confused Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden, Reid made the decision after a conference call with netroots bloggers, including Zúniga and Stoller.

Google bombing is so last year, says PromotionWorld. Google has updated its search engine to make it less open to Google bombing campaigns, such as the one that brought up the White House home page when searching for "miserable failure." Instead of Google bombing, the war for web optimization will be fought using search engine rankings, Google PageRank inbound links, MySpace, and Alexa rankings.

The Web on the Candidates

Danny Glover at AirCongress writes that Newt Gingrich is issuing us a "conversation challenge." Newt dismissed the Hillary 1984 video as "utterly, totally destructive of the process of thought. There is not a single thing in that commercial that enables America to solve a problem. … It’s the Entertainment Tonight version of governing a great country. … Everything is reduced to gossip, attack, whose consultant is cleverer. And it’s really very destructive." Instead, he's proposing that the nominees engage in a 90-minute dialogue once a week from Labor Day 2008 to Election Day. "Once a week with a timekeeper and no moderator. No Mickey Mouse questions. No gimmicks. Two adults, much like [Abraham] Lincoln and [Stephen] Douglas," he said.

The LA Times reports that Google, and to lesser extent other web companies like Yahoo and Myspace, is aggressively reaching out to political campaigns, looking to provide them with advertising and other services.
Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline thinks it's a smart move: "There's probably a lot less [money] than they think initially, but Google plays for the long term and they're smart to be there... The Internet and politics is a revolution, and Google and these guys are not going to lead the revolution, but they don't want to get shot in the back either." According to techPresident contributor Michael Bassik, 2004 campaigns only spent $12 million on online ads, compared to $1.6 billion on TV, but "political campaigns are expected to shift more of their ad dollars to the Web." Google will be waiting in the wings.