The Web on the Candidates

• Hey, what’d you guys do last night? Anything fun? Me, I read a little, took a bath, kinda quiet...kidding, kidding. Last night marked (we think) the end of the '08 primary contests, and it went out in a digital flurry. With CNN blaring Hillary Clinton's vow to keep fighting on in the background, I watched a live video stream from inside the Barack Obama rally in St. Paul...while reading Twitter commentary from my network of snarky friends and acquaintances on both the right and left...including @rghanbari, someone unknown to me before last night and whose name I don't know, who was reporting live from inside in the Xcel Center...and posting photos from what seemed to be Obama's feet. Our editor Micah Sifry likes to talk about the "world live web," and last night really felt like the Internets were changing how I experience politics.

• (Make of it what you will, but I left the Twitter-scanning tool Summize open last night in two browser windows -- one set to track "Clinton" and the other "Obama." When I got to my computer this morning, Summize reported 684 new mentions of Hillary’s name and 4080 of Barack’s.)

• Comedian, writer, and activist Baratunde Thurston had some fun with nytimes.com's interactive data doohickey showing how different demographic groups voted Clinton and Obama.

• How the World Sees Obama's Win: a nice compendium of front page news stories from across the globe; we shouldn't forget that the whole world is watching. (Thx Craig Newmark)

The Candidates on the Web

• One thing particularly striking about Hillary Clinton's speech last night was how insistently she pushed supporters to get thee to hillaryclinton.com. What was she up to? Seriously soliciting ideas on going forward? Trying to harness whatever momentum is left? Collecting emails for a future run? TechPresident’s Dan Manatt and Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas came to the same conclusion -- she's looking for help retiring her campaign debts. (Indeed, it's not subtle -- the "I'm with Hillary!" form redirects to a contribution site.)

• A day after hitting the magic number of 2,118 delegates, Obama will be in two places at once today...speaking to the pro-Israel group AIPAC live and in the flesh and addressing the SEIU convention now taking place in Puerto Rico. The senator won’t be hopping a plane to San Juan to speak to the union gathering. He’ll be using Ustream, the online streaming video app that’s quickly becoming a neat political tool.

• A new online ad from the Republican National Committee remixes video clips from the loooong campaign that feature Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Edwards criticizing Barack Obama and praising John McCain. Love it or hate it, it shows some dexterity on the video editing front.

• Writing on CIOZone, David Carr goes deep inside the Obama online effort. While much of Carr's long article is well-trod ground, points to look for include how ex-Facebooker Chris Hughes has worked to foster life to a self-directed community and how the campaign takes an eat-your-own-dog-food approach, using the same tools internally that it encourages supporters to use.

In Case You Missed It...

After the RNC boasted that their Facebook group was bigger than the Democratic National Committee's, the left-leaning netroots, Luigi Montanez, reports, rallied together to say "nothing doing."

Micah Sifry offers up "Snapshots as Campaign 2008 Resets," real-time tracking of what the web was up to last night with a look back at what the Democratic primary contest looked like from November of last year.