David All live-blogged a therapy session conference call between conservative bloggers and John McCain's campaign. "We’re looking to build relationships with all of you..." says McCain's senior advisor Terry Nelson. More at Beltway Blogroll.

AirCongress is webcasting daily snapshots from HotlineTV, a YouTube channel produced by Chuck Todd from the National Journal. Yesterday, Todd and senior editor John Mercurio discussed the chances that Rudy Giuliani will run for president. “There’s a track record here. He ran for the Senate in 2000. He got into the race for all intents and purposes and then got out,” said Mercurio. But, said Todd, “Rudy has been doing little things every day to look more and more like a candidate, and this is yet another little thing. … He’s doing as many things as Mitt Romney.” (via AirCongress)

Obama may be on to something here: candidate coffees designed for voters.

Voters play a fairly significant role in elections. It seems like a relatively obvious point, but it seems to have been lost by all but one of the top tier Presidential candidates.

The goal of any campaign is to reach, identify, and mobilize voters. The common thread of all voters is they're registered.

Only one of the Presidential candidates has an option for interested visitors to register to vote.

ParkRidge47 melds the medium and the message: Think for yourself. But rejecting the credit for something popular will always makes the MSM suspicious – anyone who refuses a byline must be hiding something.

I did a quick search on Google for "President 2008" hoping to find a collection of links to the major candidates. After all, some people think the campaign has already started. But instead of finding Hillary, Rudy, Barack, John, and the gang at the top of the free links, I found MyDD, the Polling Report, Walken 2008, and Draft Hillary atop that list, while John, Mitt, and Bill (Richardson) showed up in the sponsored links (Hillary did, too, but not her official site).

Now, while some of you may ask why the official candidate websites don't rank higher, I am stunned that Walken 2008 ranks third on this list.

Walken.

That's Christopher Walken.

Take a look at Media Matters today for a glimpse of the potential problems with mixing citizen-generated content and our current political culture — how segments of the mainstream media react when they're presented with something other than the usual scripted campaign events and talking points. I'm talking about Obamagirl, of course (bless her heart), whose winsome smile and winning figure were all over cable news the past few days.

Was her crush on the candidate a plus for him? A minus? Who knows for sure, but some commentators were happy to fit the moment into a running media theme about Obama — that he's too young and too pretty to be President of the United States. Obama lacks substance, apparently, despite the dry policy speeches he's happy to give, and the Obamagirl video fits into the world-view of that part of the political commentariat that doesn't want to take him seriously.

Or, at least she did until this morning — shortly after a reporter contacted her, she pulled out of the Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)." Slate has details; Caroline Giuliani and her brother Andrew have apparently not gotten along with dad so much since he remarried. Gotta love these Internets of ours — hey kids, guess what! Put something online, and it might just be a little public.

Increasingly, new tools are empowering local "amateur" campaign staffers to produce quality content centered around local people.

Joe Trippi is one of the few political consultants who speaks frankly, even to the detriment of his clients, and loves democracy even more than he loves politics. I caught up with him for an hour-long conversation about his work for the John Edwards campaign, why Hillary Clinton might be the Howard Dean of 2008, and how the Iowa caucus is like the Internet.

Managing placements of online ads can be a challenge, as the Obama campaign recently learned. With more caucuses and primaries approaching, his campaign accidentally placed an ad for Nevada on a South Carolina TV news website. This seems to be an isolated incident. Fortunately, online ads can be swapped or pulled in ways that print ads cannot. The ad is no longer displayed on the News 14 website.