It is conventional wisdom these days that Republicans are playing catchup on the Internet -- David All and GOP techPresident contributors excepted.

But Democrats shouldn't take their perceived online edge for granted. The GOP is aware of the gap and just hired a big gun to get its Internet operation back in the game.

Ben Smith at the Politico reports today that the RNC has hired Yahoo! exec and former Slate co-founder Cyrus Krohn as their eCampaign Director.

GOP front runners seem to be bailing on the September 17 YouTube/CNN debate. Democrats should rejoice at this news. Here's why.

Rightroots, another competitor to Act Blue, relaunches; MTV is looking for a few good citizen journalists; Silicon Valley is the new Detroit; Chris Dodd releases a video montage focusing on -- gasp! -- the issues; and Daylife experiments with a list of the most commonly-used phrases by the candidates.

The Republican National Committee just launched a new online game called Scariest Democrat, a Halloween-themed contest attacking the Democratic presidential field that invites visitors to "click on the Scariest Democrat." Complete with creepy sound-effects, the site drew 65,000 visitors by 4pm on its first day, and RNC e-campaign manager Cyrus Krohn told Marc Ambinder that "nearly 9,000 people had spent the time to give the RNC their e-mail address in order to vote." But DNC internet director Josh McConaha isn't impressed by the RNC's numbers, and points to the Dems' recent online campaign for S-Chip that, he says, was as much as 16 times as effective at mobilizing supporters.

John McCain is the next candidate up in the MTV/MySpace presidential dialogues; we'll be liveblogging it direct from New Hampshire; dirty emails tricks are cropping up in Iowa; YouTube encourages user responses to the candidates and the about last week's debate; Google is the new GE. Is that a good thing?; the Blog P.I. looks at three Republican fundraising sites and chooses his favorite; and the web is full of misogynistic mudslinging about Hillary Clinton.

Matt Bai identifies the core lesson of the Dean campaign, and says that almost no 2008 campaigns have actually learned it; ActBlue seeks to move beyond individual fundraising; William Beutler stays on the Republican ActBlue beat; the ONE campaign produces videos of the candidates' statements on poverty, but most Republicans aren't involved; OuijaVote 2008 is the first project to restore our "paranormal democracy"; new Compete data breaks down candidate site popularity by state; and our Hitwise charts show Mike Huckabee pulling even with Ron Paul in his share of web traffic.

Cool new maps illustrated the political blogosphere like never before; Voter Search lets you find out your voting status in New York State; the Iowa Caucus Calculator makes caucus calculus easy; Mitt Romney and John McCain have dominated the buying of online ads; the RNC is obsessed with Hillary Clinton.

So the winners in NH or Clinton and McCain, much to everyone's surprise. Mike Connery has an excellent explanation for Clinton's success among young voters; Jeff Jarvis wonders if Obama could be the first candidate elected by the Internet; Todd Zeigler reviews Obama's revamped site design, and likes what he sees; Jose Antonio Vargas investigates the netroots' tepid support for Obama; Hillary Clinton suddenly voices support for government bloggers and transparency; and the RNC and DNC post stale responses to last night's victories.

Jeff Jarvis rounds up the many, many ways to chop, splice, and parse online data about the elections; General JC Christian produces a Second Life parody site devoted to Mike Huckabee; Al Qaeda asks its members to submit questions to its #2 leader; what Star Wars characters do the candidates remind you of?; Ron Paul launches an effort to recruit precinct captains; and RNC online operations guy Cyrus Krohn gets a nice puff piece.

Voto Latino combines the telenovela with voter registration; the brief rise and fall of Unity 08; why are we seeing such a rise in Democratic voter turnout?; the Clinton Spendometer makes an outrageous claim about Hillary Clinton's spending proposals; Barack Obama is raising a ton of money in the aftermath of South Carolina; the Obama campaign continues to an email issuing from a dark place in America; and Hillary again responds to supporters' questions in a new video.