The Web on the Candidates

• Matt Stoller is getting excited about Rock the Vote's new API. "Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote... It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration." I admit that I've been getting all excited myself about Facebook's new Platform, and this innovation from Rock the Vote fits the bill too -- potentially connecting millions of new people to waves of data to be shared, mashed-up, and used in unforeseen ways.
• This weekend Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal published a great profile of Chris Hughes, the 23 year-old wunderkind who is one of the three Harvard grads behind Facebook and now works for the Obama campaign. He now pulls 14-hour days working on My.BarackObama.com and translating his expertise about running social networks to helping run the online portion of a presidential campaign. However, "what the Obama campaign wanted wasn't a Facebook clone; the goal is political action, not socializing," Schatz writes. Hughes is therefore in a unique position to turn the social web into the political web. Read the rest.
• Elizabeth Edwards recently spent a half-hour on a conference call with a group called the Asian Pacific Islanders for Progress, writes Ariel Sabar of the Christian Science Monitor. Her attention to the fairly unknown group is testament to how "the Internet-driven political activism that helped bankroll former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's insurgent 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is back, in ways that are starting to transcend fundraising." Something as simple as forming a website can turn a loosely-connected group of voters into an interest group to be reckoned with.

The Candidates on the Web

• Two articles this morning take up the Fred Thompson question. In one, Ken Yarmosh at the American Thinker sees Thompson's scattered web presences as one of his big vulnerabilities, since he has no web site to unify it all. If you Google "fred thompson," he writes, the first two hits are from Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (though when I tried it the second hit was Draft Fred Thompson for President), and Mitt Romney is buying Google ad words on Thompson, so an ad for his site shows up in the Sponsored Links section of the results. While Thompson still isn't officially running (something tells me that status will change shortly), he needs a web site to call his own that will be readily accessible.

  Meanwhile, Paul West of the Baltimore Sun has the opposite to say, writing that Thompson has been successful at "exploiting an extensive and expanding network of conservative media outlets, old and new," making major announcements on Fox News, posting to conservative blogs, and making a video in response to Michael Moore that was viewed on YouTube over 100,000 times. This method of using established media channels to carry the message rather than creating a centralized web site is more out of necessity than strategy - I'm sure he'll have something up when he declares. In the meantime, however, distributing the message across the web and on TV sure creates buzz, and Thompson routinely lands in the number one or two slot in GOP straw polls.

In Case You Missed It...

With an appearance on Bill Maher and increasing demands on Eventful, Ron Paul is getting more and more popular online.

Fred Stutzman weighs in with an analysis of the new Facebook Platform.