The Web on the Candidates

• Tired of the ol' blue state/red state divide and its ugly stepchildren, those "purple states"? The Christian Science Monitor is too, so they've built a great new site called Patchwork Nation that maps much more nuanced understandings of the American electorate, from Boom Towns to Evangelical Epicenters to Minority Central to Monied 'Burbs. They've identified 11 such communities overall, and in addition producing a cool map (we're so blinded by cool maps) they're blogging about issues particular to those communities. Also check out out the timeline showing what kind of community groups the candidates have been visiting. But what will the punditocracy do without a binary explanation of American politics?

• Lawyer/artist Ranjit Singh Mathoda has a great post on Barack Obama and the "coming digital presidency." Citing Obama's impressive interest in and understanding of social technologies (check out this post by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreeson for more), Mathoda implies that, just as JFK was the first television president, Obama could be the first digital president. He then details the way Obama's use of social networking apps could be parlayed into governance. Good stuff.

• Someone asked him to write an essay for an upcoming anthology (ok, we confess, it was us!), so online journalism guru Jeff Jarvis posted a sneak peak of his upcoming book called -- seriously --- What Would Google Do? He'll be covering the future of the government online, and he's offering up some interesting bits of counter-intuition. For example: Abolish the Freedom of Information Act. Don't worry, it isn't as scary as it sounds.

• Toying with the black art of online attention analysis, data miner extraordinaire Matthew Hurst looks at Nielsen BuzzMetrics data showing bursts of attention around Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over the last few months. While their trends tend follow one another (though Obama typically gets more attention), Hurst notices that during certain moments -- Super Tuesday results, comments from Michelle Obama, and the Jeremiah Wright media circus -- Obama's attention spikes, and Clinton's stays put. Hurst calls these "independent burst of attention." Are they important? Hurst isn't sure. Perhaps "all news is good news (if it keeps attention on you?) Obama's increased attention precipitates surprises? Surprises keep attention on a candidate?"

• For what it's worth: IT workers are roughly split between favoring Obama and John McCain. One difference between techies and the rest of the country, roughly 11 percent support Mike Huckabee, and 9 percent support... guess who?

• Political blogging sleuth William Beutler witnessed a funny collision of old and new media this morning. How we'd love to slap a techPres banner on every bus in NYC...

The Candidates on the Web

• A new video of a 12-year-old newscast gives lie to Hillary Clinton's recent claim that she arrived on a state trip to Bosnia in 1996 "under sniper fire." The newscast is gaining traction, and has been viewed 250,000 times since it went up Friday. Matthew Yglesias has the sarcastic goods.

• Remember that "3 am" ad from the Clinton camp that got so much attention back in the pre-Jeremiah Wright glory days of the campaign. It's been documented that the sleeping girl in the ad actually supports Obama. Now she's out with her own video confirming that not only does she support Obama, but she's an Obama precinct captain in Washington State!