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.
• My favorite candidate for president: me! U4Prez.com is a voting site that lets anyone "run" for president, posting their political beliefs, biography, platform, and favorite and worst presidents on the site. Then site's users rate them. If it sounds like a crazy idea, it kind of is, but it gives ordinary Americans the chance to test out their political opinions and gauge the public's response. While some biographies can be confusing, typo-ridden, or aggressive ("More often than not I agree with the Democrats on economic issues and more often than not I agree with Republicans"; "I'M LARGE AND IN CHARGE, OFTEN IMITATED BUT IMPOSSIBLE TO DUPLICATE. GET IN MY WAY AND I'LL RUN RIGHT OVER YOU.") people with the real intention of running for office are using the site as well. Take Cliff Potts of Fort Worth: "I see much of what is happing in the nation as shameful. We have engaged in an ill conceived war in Iraq, and have abandoned any resemblance of fiscal responsibility or providing for domestic wellbeing... I do want to get involved in the political life of the United States. My ultimate goal is to run for the U.S. Senate here in Texas."
• The Hotline's Blogometer is running a series of "Blogger Spotlights" that take a close look at the folks behind unofficial presidential blogs. Yesterday they interviewed Jeremy Cluchey, the man behind the pro-Obama site Obamarama, in which he discusses the responsibility bloggers will have as they gain power: "If we get too wrapped up in the bullying of politicians, pretty soon we'll start looking an awful lot like the special interest groups that controlled the politics many of us came here to change. That would be a shame."

The Candidates on the Web

• Dennis Kucinich has released his official MySpace page. It's a nicely designed site with a video about Kucnich's anti-war resolution at the top and photo slideshow below.
• The Edwards campaign goes carbon neutral. "By conserving energy and purchasing carbon offsets, the Edwards campaign will offset the carbon emitted by Edwards and his staff's campaign travel, and the energy used in his campaign headquarters and field offices," his campaign says. This move makes Edwards the only current presidential candidate to go carbon neutral; Tom Vilsack announced his intention to go neutral earlier this year, before dropping out of the race.

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