I guess it's because he's not running for president that Bill Frist is now free to communicate like a normal human being. Presidential candidates should take a lesson.

The draft movement for conservative actor and former Senator, Fred Thompson, has launched its website under the refreshingly simply URL -- Fred08.com.

The draft campaign for Fred Thompson (insert law-and-order.wav file), is currently the top buzz-worthy topic among conservative bloggers that I talk to.

The Web on the Candidates

A new site called QubeTV sees itself as a conservative alternative to YouTube. “It won’t be easy to compete against a giant like YouTube, but if enough conservatives embrace the idea, it could become the go-to place for conservative video on the Web,” said Robert Bluey, director of the Center for Media & Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation. The site was started by two former aides to Ronald Reagan, Charlie Gerow and Jeff Lord. “Conservatives now have the opportunity to be in ‘Web 2.0’. Our goal is to make QubeTV the dominant social network site for anyone who is right-of-center and to have the best in online video, especially online video related to the campaign of 2008,” Gerow said. Check out Wonkette's snarky take on the site.

Two surveys have been released that show an increased reliance on the web for information related to the 2008 election. A Word of Mouth Marketing poll found that "Forty-two percent of Americans say they will get more pre-election information from the internet in 2008 than they did in 2004," and online ad network Burst Media found that one quarter of likely voters think the web is the best place to research the candidates, making it the most popular source of information for 2008. The Burst study also found that more than 20% of likely voters had visited a candidate's web site, and almost half would watch online video of a candidate.

RedState had the story first. Followed by Breitbart, then Drudge. I can't remember now who it was who said that the Republicans seemed to be on a roller-coaster, with a different flavor rising and then crashing each month. Our best wishes to Senator Thompson...

The Web on the Candidates

Last night YouTube launched a new feature called "Spotlight." Each week, a different candidate will be in the "spotlight" on YouTube, putting up a video and asking for video responses from the YouTube community. Viewers will have one week to upload their responses, and at the end of the week the candidate will upload another video reflecting on those responses. As Jeff Jarvis notes, this is basically a mirror image of his PrezConference project, which asks citizens to upload videos first, and for candidates to respond. The first candidate to participate is Mitt Romney, who asks the not-so-substantive question "what do you believe is America's single greatest challenge, and what would you do to address it?"

The Web on the Candidates

The Bivings Report's Steve Peterson has a good roundup of what sites are buying ads on Google for searches of candidate names. For example, when you do a search for "Joe Biden," what comes up? According to Peterson, you'll see ads for "Joe Biden Videos" from YouTube, "Joe Biden for President" from DemocratStuff.com (bumper stickers and stuff), "Your Vote Counts" from DeclareYourself.com, and "President Joe Biden" from BeatBushGear.com. With some exceptions, other candidates have similar results; it's all about the campaign gear.

In MySpace news not related to the battle for Barack's MySpace page, writer Brian Frazer has decided that Obama is a bad MySpace friend. He was tired of getting hit with messages from Obama's profile (before it switched to the campaign-run profile) that seemed to him to update every little moment in the life of the profile. he thought about responding with his out daily tidbits. "Before a potential bulletin about 'What a Delicious Dinner' or 'My Dog Just Caught a Frisbee' appeared on my screen, I called up Obama's profile, clicked 'delete' and dropped him as a MySpace pal. Bottom line: I think he'd make a great president. But as a friend, he's a little too high maintenance."

With all eyes on Fred Thompson as he gives a keynote speech tonight (11:30PM EST), I was reminded of a scheme I hatched a couple weeks ago to create a parallel campaign for Arthur Branch for President.  Branch, Thompson’s Law & Order alter ego, is probably the way most of America knows Thompson now.  With that in mind, I thought that if I could confuse the electorate with an Arthur Branch campaign, whenever they saw Thompson speak, they would think they were watching Branch.  Then when voters went to the polls looking to vote for Branch, they wouldn’t find him on the ballot, just this unfamiliar Fred Thompson.

* Left and right are buzzing about Republican candidate Ron Paul's surprising showings online. He's been the most popular candidate on MySpace since before anyone was paying attention to the friends-chase there, a reflection of the disproportionate number of libertarians among techies online. More recently, he's been at the top of Technorati's most searched terms, and he's also big on Digg. But now these online forays are starting to earn Paul some unusual attention from the mainstream media.

The Web on the Candidates

Matt Stoller is getting excited about Rock the Vote's new API. "Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote... It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration." I admit that I've been getting all excited myself about Facebook's new Platform, and this innovation from Rock the Vote fits the bill too -- potentially connecting millions of new people to waves of data to be shared, mashed-up, and used in unforeseen ways.

This weekend Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal published a great profile of Chris Hughes, the 23 year-old wunderkind who is one of the three Harvard grads behind Facebook and now works for the Obama campaign. He now pulls 14-hour days working on My.BarackObama.com and translating his expertise about running social networks to helping run the online portion of a presidential campaign. However, "what the Obama campaign wanted wasn't a Facebook clone; the goal is political action, not socializing," Schatz writes. Hughes is therefore in a unique position to turn the social web into the political web. Read the rest.

The Web on the Candidates
John Edwards stopped by the YouTube studio yesterday to record an interview with politics editor Steve Grove. It started as a gregarious interview, with Grove jokingly asking if Edwards spent the Memorial Day weekend on a beach in South Carolina (Edwards answered that he spent the weekend attending 13 town hall meetings), but it soon turned thoughtful. Edwards answered a few user-submitted questions ("What's your biggest fault?") and became especially reflective when discussing his wife Elizabeth's cancer. Grove ended with a "shotgun" round of questions in which he asked Edwards to answer if he though certain things should be rights or priveleges for Americans. When asked about handgun ownership and citizenship for workers who have lived in the U.S. for one year, Edwards took a moment before responding "privilege," and the interview came to an end soon after. Despite our insistence on unscripted, off-the-cuff video, this interview was well done and showed a different side of Edwards than we are used to seeing.