The Web on the Candidates

• From the Department of "What Alanis Morrisette Would Have Called Ironic But is Really Just Bad Timing": Brave New Films had its YouTube channel temporarily shuttered when the company that syndicates fiery radio host Michael Savage complained about liberal California film shop's use of a one-minute clip, reports the LA Times. Perhaps proving the Larry Lessig-ism that "fair use" means the right to hire a lawyer, BNF's YouTube channel, which boast more than 300 videos, went dark -- pulling down its YouTube-hosted video across the web -- right at the moment when the vice presidential debate was feeding a frenzy of interest in the election. Stanford's Fair Use Project is suing Savage on BNF's behalf. The video in question, the subtly-named "Michael Savage Hates Muslims," has been pulled from YouTube but lives on here. #

• Report Card Time for John and Barack: Let's forget talk of who sleeps with a Blackberry under his pillow and break it down -- how do Barack Obama and John McCain stack up when you isolate out specific tech issues, assess their records and visions, and assign a clear-cut grade? Wired's Nicholas Thompson has done just that. He's launched a scorecard (with extra Reddit-enabled collaboration goodies) that rates the candidates on five tech challenges: green tech, wireless spectrum reform, broadband access, network neutrality, and H-1B visas. Check out the grades and join in the spirited discussion over on Wired.com. On techPresident, Nancy Scola suggests that the actual tech topics Nicholas picked might have tilted the playing field a bit. (To whom? Not telling! You'll have to clickity-click-click.) And she points to techPres's primary season scorecards that graded both the Republican and Democratic benches on the totality of their tech worthiness. #

• Life Rafts for Staying Afloat Amid the Deluge: Lifehacker.com's raison d'etre is to help us citizens of the wired world cope with the tidal wave of information modern life seems to whip up each and every day -- and stay happy, productive, and reasonably sane while we do it. Now their Kevin Purdy has help on making sense of what's perhaps the most interesting presidential election, um, ever, with pointers to everything from Microsoft's brand new Political Streams to OpenSecrets.org to the polling hub FiveThirtyEight.com. Also on the making-sense-of-it-all front: Memorandum Colors is a new Greasemonkey plug-in/Firefox extension that uses the linking patterns of political bloggers to assign a shade -- from dark blue to dark red -- to the stream of entries that pop up on the popular aggregator site. #

• From Sabermatrician to Election Guru: He's neither a fresh-faced politician nor cute apple-cheeked girl plucking petals off of a daisy, but Nate Silver is nonetheless one of the breakout stars of this election cycle. Nate is the brains behind the aforementioned FiveThirtyEight, which bills itself as "Electoral Projections Done Right." New York Magazine's Adam Sternbergh has a detailed and wide-ranging profile of a guy who was until recently best known to baseball geeks for developing an algorithm that was startling accurate at predicting how teams and players would perform in the far off future. If you can't get enough of Nate, check out Andrew Romano's Newsweek profile, which explores how as an anonymous blogger named "Poblano" he snuck up on professional election forecasters with his eerily prescient prediction of how Hillary Clinton would perform in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Obama Executes Plan to Game the Vote: On GigaOM, Wagner James Au confirms what was bubbling up last week: the Obama campaign is indeed politicking in Xbox Live game "Burnout Paradise." James has confirmation from Electronic Arts, the game’s publisher, that the Obama campaign is picking up the tab for in-game billboards promoting early vote. As James notes, the candidate could be accused of sending somewhat mixed messages when it comes to gaming. "Earlier this year," he writes, "he was telling audiences that parents need to 'turn off the television set, and put the video games away.'" Or it could just be that the Obama campaign is savvy enough to, to borrow a phrase from Barry Goldwater, hunt where the ducks are. #

• GOP Hoping ACORN Does Fall Far from the Tree: With voting registration wrapping up in many states and attention turning to the actual mechanics of how the U.S. will pick its next president, the Republican National Committee and the McCain camp are eager to spread its thinking on how Barack Obama's path may have crossed with ACORN, the community-based group now the news for its voter outreach practices. The RNC has put together Obama's ACORN Tree, which features as its center leaf the RNC's talking points on community organizing. And the McCain campaign is making a concerted effort to have its web video tying ACORN to Obama go viral, asking supporters to contribute their address books to the cause. #

In Case You Missed It...

Micah Sifry provides a rundown of some of your more esoteric bits of election-related metadata, from number of Flickr photos tagged with the candidates' names to the surprising number of times Obama used the word "pie" at a rally this weekend in West Philadelphia (15). And Micah also has an insightful look at the changes at Change.org, with particular focus on cracking the nut of using social media to push people into meaningful social action.

Nancy Scola looks at the last-minute push to get the candidates to insist upon cracking open the the third and final presidential debate, to be held tomorrow night at Long Island's Hofstra University.