The Web on the Candidates

• Steve Grove, YouTube's politics editor, posted a new video explaining YouTube's approach to politics. It's basically a greatest-hits package with clips from Mitt Romney, John Edwards, and John McCain's spotlight videos. Grove also shows us some bits from supporter videos, including one from Bryan Barton, who mashed up videos of Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter with a Nintendo game (Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, to be exact). The point of all this? The show video's (and YouTube's) primacy in the presidential race.
• The Washington Post has launched a new "Campaign Tracker" tool that takes information from campaigns, media reports, and Google Maps to map the locations of candidate events (excluding, of course, fundraisers). It's a pretty basic tool at the moment, but it provides a searchable events database that reaches back to January, and gives a quick snapshot of where all of the candidates are at a particular moment. (via the Bivings Report)

The Candidates on the Web

• Rudy Giuliani has released a new web ad called "Leadership" on the front page of his site, and it takes a cue from the John McCain school of web ads: make them exactly like TV ads. Over a montage of images of Rudy and children playing in sprinklers and sitting in a school room ("safety"), and with sections of Rudy's speeches doing the narrating, it plays just like a typical TV ad. It's not a bad ad, but, like the rest of Rudy's site, it fails to take advantage of the intimacy and informality of the web.
• Barack Obama's had a MySpace shakeup. He's been the leader in MySpace friends months, and up to yesterday had over 160,000 friends, four times more than Hillary Clinton and almost six times more than John Edwards. But now the page -- created by a volunteer way back in 2004 -- is locked and the campaign must rebuild the it from scratch. At this writing he has about 9500 friends on the new page, which has the same url as the old. We're still trying to gather what exactly happened, so stay tuned...

In Case You Missed It...

Mike Turk reviews John McCain's updated web site and finds it 65% less depressing.