The Web on the Candidates

• In a great post titled “How Liberals Rule the Web,” OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller gives a handful of examples — 1,000,000 people disliking George Bush on Facebook, Tom Hanks endorsing Obama on MySpace, Color of Change’s petition pushing the Dems to accept the will of the popular vote for the nomination — of how the web has enabled liberals to bypass standard media filters and get their message out in an unprecedented way. This is all true, though the web isn’t just for liberals (they’re just, for the moment, better at using it).

• Another example Stoller mentions is Donna Edwards’ congressional victory, which was aided by his and other online progressives’ hard work. The Baltimore Sun’s Bradley Olson writes about how Stoller and his cohort helped raise $400,000 for Edwards from more than 8,000 donors. It’s a solid example of online activism generating real results.

• If you’re frustrated with tracking the primary results on the tee-vee, tune in to Twitter. NPR social web guru Andy Carvin has been setting up feeds for all of the primary results; tonight go to twitter.com/voteIN and twitter.com/voteNC to keep track of things. (Note: both sites are going through some technical issues which will hopefully be cleared up in time.)

• Courtesy of Ben “Finger on the Pulse of Hip-Hop” Smith comes another pro-Obama rap track, this one produced by Ti$a. It has a good groove, dancers, and a repetitive line about Barack. This ain’t your mother’s “Yes We Can.”

• I’d firmly decided not to give another email scammer from Nigeria access to my bank account; I’d just been burned too many times. But then I ran across Gas Tax Scam, a purported letter from “Senator Hillary Clinton” and “Senator John McCain” (that sounded respectable!) that promised to “deliver to your [sic] a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a ‘GAS TAX HOLIDAY.’” Yay! Thirty bucks! Finally a random site I could trust. Unfortunately, I discovered that it, too, was a scam — perpetrated by Living Liberally community man David Alpert! It seems he was trying to point out his issues with Clinton and McCain’s summer gas tax relief plans. Fooled again. The site took off like a rocket on Digg and is presumably now being read by hundreds of thousands of people who probably don’t vote in IN or NC, but you never know…

• But seriously, it seems like every day someone is using the web to mess with the narratives spun by the campaigns and the media. It’s not only the Gas Tax Scam; see last week’s doctored video that put words in former Clinton advisor Mickey Kantor’s mouth. This disruptive media is another kind of voter-generated content enabled by the web, in which anyone can not only make videos or sites that support or attack the candidates, but they can make political mashup graffiti that affects, however quickly, the daily news cycle and spin. Brings a new meaning to tagging the election.

• A new white paper on the “MySpace Election” has just been released in which Stan Greenberg, Anna Greenberg, Dave Walker, and James Carville (yes, that James Carville) “report on the record youth turnout in 2008 and the role of the internet in the elections.” It’s a big PdF download, so this one’s for the train, the plane, or putting your children to bed. One highlight: youth turnout is up a whopping 88% in the Dem primaries so far, 7% percent in the Rep primaries. McCain, get your youth on!

• Who uses Dogpile to search the web anymore? Not me, I’m an AltaVista guy all the way. But the folks at Dogpile are still keeping it going and have added caricatures of Obama and Clinton, in which the candidates take turns tempting a dog with a bone, to the home page. So wait, the clueless canine is supposed to be the electorate? Nice one, Dogpile. I’m sticking with AltaVista.

The Candidates on the Web

• TechPresident contributor Colin Delany checks in with political ad blog Ad of the Day and finds a bunch of fun ad analysis from Read Scott Martin. A quick summary: Obama’s been pushing early voting in Indiana, while Hillary’s ads are more general. Meanwhile, John McCain (remember him?) has been advertising on relieving the gas tax.

In Case You Missed It…

In a fantastic and popular post, Colin Delany wonders if Facebook’s moment in the sun as a hot political tool has passed. If so, what does that tell us about the future of social networking sites for online political organizing, and even about the future of Facebook itself?