Clay Shirky talks to Salon about online organizing, Obama Girl, and more; polls show Obama Girl is getting tiresome; the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch is keeping a close eye on Hillary's chances; Jeff Jarvis asks who should be the nation's CTO; now all of the candidates have produced versions of Hillary's "3am" ad; The John McCain Facebook Challenge encourages Republicans to befriend the McCainiac; and McCain's campaign hires a new web guru.

Patchwork Nation dispenses with the red/blue state divide; Obama and the coming digital presidency; Jeff Jarvis on what Google would do; online attention to Obama raises questions; shocker: IT workers split between McCain and Obama; a random example of old media/new media advertising; Hillary Clinton running from sniper fire in Bosnia? A video shows otherwise; and the girl in Clinton's "3am" ad is an Obama precinct captain.

Liberal bloggers are divided about Hillary Clinton's aggressive campaign tactics; maybe Peter Daou is finding success at Daily Kos after all; in a cosmic quest for accurate predictions, Huffpostrology combines polling data and astrology; new widgets from MAPLight let voters track congressional fundraising; Jeff Jarvis catches up with British Conservative leader David Cameron; and Dennis Kucinich drops out.

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.

It's time to set the record straight on the history of online political debates, in the wake of press reports and claims that this week's Yahoo!/HuffingtonPost/Slate debate was the first.

The Web on the Candidates

A good back-and-forth about the successes, failures, merits, and results of the CNN/YouTube debate is taking place over at Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine. In a long, (maybe too) complicated discussion, Jarvis reiterates his disappointment in the debate, thinking that "TV got in the way" of the authenticity promised by YouTube's participation. He goes head-to-head with BBC'er Kevin Marsh, who called the debate a "terrific clash... between two media cultures; old-style 'big journalism' and new-style 'citizen media.'" Marsh then calls Jarvis an "uber-zealot" who wants to "bring video-sharing into the democratic process." Jarvis responds, the gloves come off, Marsh shows up in the comments, and another commenter brings things things back to earth.

A new site called Map the Candidates uses Google Maps and pulls in information from YouTube, online news sources, and candidate web sites to... map the candidates. You can view individuals candidates' paths across the country (well, across the early primary states) or look at all of the candidates' paths together, which can get cluttered pretty quickly. It's very similar to the Washington Post's Campaign Tracker, but could actually prove more useful. A good mashup.

William Beutler of Blog P.I. has a nice update/analysis of Mitt Romney's jump in to the YouTube pool.

What I find most interesting is that Mitt's eGuy, Stephen Smith, left a comment on Beutler's post which tells me two things: 1. Smith is paying attention to what people are saying about his guy. 2. Smith has been given "permission" to be a "spokesblogger" for the campaign.

Keep going...

The Web on the Candidates
Jeff Jarvis posts a great video on PrezVid grading most of the candidates on their use of YouTube, and showing us some of the best and worst moments from their videos.  John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich both get a 'B,' the highest grade Jarvis hands out.  Edwards is "the best of the bunch" with a video of a speech to a labor convention.  "He's passionate and the video is well-organized," Jarvis says.  The Kucinich video actually stars his British-born wife, and Jarvis likes it: " Best candidate spouse accent. Best candidate spouse hair. She’s quick, newsy, and charming. What’s not to like?"  Most of the others were average at best.  Obama "keeps making Sally Field videos: They love him, they really love him," and Giuliani is "pathetic" for putting up audio of Steve Forbes' endorsement, paired with a photo of Forbes.  Check out Jarvis' video for the report card.

The Hotline's Blogometer notes a growing frustration with Barack Obama among the netroots community.  Linking to the Daily Kos and MyDD,  the Blogometer says that "Obama has not done enough to separate himself from the Dem establishment on netroots bread and butter issues like the war and economic populism."  

The Web on the Candidates

A commenter on Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine says that "there's a big elephant in the room on viral video for politics," which is that as more political advertising (and eyeballs) end up on YouTube, local broadcast stations will lose their most cherished sources of funding, similar to the way Craigslist has challenged newspapers' classified ads model.  The dominant advertising mode is still TV, Jarvis writes, but it won't be that way forever: "All political advertising won’t migrate online yet because the audience on broadcast is bigger and campaigns are inherently conservative. But there will be a point of no return."   

James Kotecki's new video takes a look at the most popular videos on YouTube that feature politicians doing or saying something stupid.  He isn't sure that, in the end, these assorted "macaca" moments will ultimately affect the race, since the more we record candidates' every move, the more likely they'll get caught making gaffes, and we'll become used to the idea that candidates make mistakes.  Kotecki ends with a sorta-funny montage of his own "gaffes."

The Web on the Candidates

The search for parkridge47: It's been two weeks since techPresident's Micah Sifry first posted his email exchange with "parkridge47," creator of the Obama/Clinton "Vote Different" video, but the search for his or her true identity continues. In the video's wake, Micah and PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej have been quoted and interviewed all over the place, including CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Townhall.com.

Jeff Jarvis has an idea: let's videotape ourselves asking questions of the presidential candidates, upload them to YouTube, and tag them PREZCONFERENCE. "This way, we’ll see which questions the candidates answer and which they don’t. In the UK, Conservative leader David Cameron answers five questions a week, three of them selected by the voters. We need to hear our candidates answer our questions here." He offers five examples of such videos, taken at at the VON conference at San Jose.