The Web on the Candidates

• Have you been waiting impatiently for someone to combine the telenovela with a voter registration drive? Wait no longer, Voto Latino is here. The site uses a pleasing array of Web 2.0 goodness (MySpace and Faceook widgets, Yahoo! maps, YouTube) to encourage Latinos to register to vote. At its center is a hilarious sendup of telenovelas starring Rosario Dawson and Wilmer Valderrama that brings melodrama, humor, and passion to its message: register to vote! It’s a sterling example of how to combine the web and traditional PR to create a funny and important public service message.

• techPresident’s Micah Sifry has a good piece in this week’s the Nation about the (brief) rise and fall of Unity 08, the wannabe third party seeking to use the web to nominate a unity ticket in 2008. But with a “narrow and artificial base of aging political consultants and college kids,” the group couldn’t raise enough money to keep going, so now they’re pushing for a Bloomberg candidacy. Micah thinks that might not be such a good idea. “The current presidential field is a lot tougher than the candidates Bloomberg has faced in New York,” he writes. “And other than a few consultants and earnest college students, no one seems to be clamoring for an iconoclastic billionaire to get into the race.”

• Also in the Nation, OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller looks at why Democratic turnout in the primaries and caucuses has exploded this year. Stoller mostly argues that it’s “because of a mixture of improved technology, better organizers and more investment in voter contact, Democratic campaigns have simply gotten better at talking to more people.” While he gets pretty inside-baseball about how field operations are working, the fact is that, thanks to new technologies and renewed voter interest, Democrats are now much better at that crucial step of getting supporters to actually talk to each other.

• In a twist on the traditional Howard Dean bat-style fundraising graphic, the RNC has created the Clinton Spendometer, a widget-ized thermometer that tracks Hillary CLinton's “reckless spending proposals.” It’s at $888.6 and counting — almost a trillion dollars? Methinks the RNC is playing loose with the numbers.

The Candidates on the Web

• Bigger than Iowa and New Hampshire: the Washington Post’s Matthew Mosk and Jose Antonio Vargas report that immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in South Carolina Saturday, the Obama website saw the “highest peak” in donations and traffic of the entire campaign. According to a campaign source, money was coming in online at a rate of $500,000 per hour. Any way you slice it, that’s a phenomenal number, and it’s more evidence that Obama has become the true online fundraising juggernaut of the cycle.

• The Politico's Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown investigate Obama's coordinated response to the continuing email campaign trying to spread "the myth that Obama is a crypto-Muslim Manchurian candidate." The campaign has been fighting the messages since it launched a year ago, and the campaign says it doesn't suspect Hillary Clinton or any other candidate is behind it. Rather, as Smith and Budoff Brown write, the emails are "a largely organic expression of a dark place in the American consciousness." A dark place indeed.

• Hillary Clinton is continuing her post-Iowa pledge to connect to young voters, posting her second video of answers to supporters’ questions. As in her first video, Hillary responds to questions submitted, in top-down Hillary style, through a form on her site. There’s a good range in there, from how to make college affordable to hiring more teachers. Completing the outreach effort, the answers are intercut with clips of young voters praising Hillary. It’s definitely a good move for her; for better or worse, she’s often at her best when going through policy proposals with a staffer.

In Case You Missed It…

Micah Sifry notices that professional and amateur videographers online are starting to zero in on Hillary Clinton in a way that could subtly hurt her image. Will her campaign respond?

Political campaigns typically use search advertising primarily for long-term list-building, but with a big chunk of February 5th voters apparently still undecided, Colin Delany wonders if targeted search ads should be an effective way to reach people who are still making up their minds?

Hearty congratulations are in order for Julie Barko Germany, who has just been officially named the new director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) at George Washington University.

A new website called Politweets gleans the “tweets” which mention political candidates’ names and then displays them on its site in real time, writes Kristin Gorski It’s become a news outlet, where private citizens, traditional media, and even the candidates’ themselves tweet about facts, opinion and web links to anyone who reads.