The Web on the Candidates

• Steve Grove, the politics editor at YouTube, has launched a new weekly series called Citizentube This Week, "a look at what's happening in YouTube news and politics... which a special focus on content that you're posting to YouTube." In the first episode Steve discusses -- who else? -- Obamagirl (I've spent the last three days trying to get that song out of my head. Thanks, Steve). He also shows clips from a few other videos of notes, including one of Croatian interior minister Ivica Kirin calling YouTube "Yubito," which has apparently become a national joke in Croatia. The show should be good fun - there won't be any lack of material to cover.
• Jose Antonio Vargas at the Washington Post notes that the top two most-searched-for terms at Technorati last week were "YouTube" and "Ron Paul" and writes that "the presence of the obscure Republican congressman from Texas on a list that includes terms such as 'Sopranos,' 'Paris Hilton' and 'iPhone' is a sign of the online buzz building around the long-shot Republican presidential hopeful -- even as mainstream political pundits have written him off." As we've frequently seen, Ron Paul is at or near the top of our social networking popularity charts, and only Barack Obama has more cumulative video views on YouTube. All of this attention has helped Paul raise money, about $100,000 after each debate. "I tell you I've never raised money as efficiently as that, in all my years in Congress, and all I'm doing is speaking my mind," he told Vargas.
• Benjamin J. Higginbotham at Technology Evangelist has good list of 11 web technologies for political campaigns. We've covered most of what's covered on the list before -- Google Maps, Ustream.tv, blogs, rss, etc. -- but Higginbotham throws in a few new tricks and toys, including using Brightcove as your main video conduit (but continuing to upload to the other sites as well), Grand Central, a service that lets candidates record messages directly to supporters' voicemail (hmmm....) and Google Radio, which extends AdWords to the radio market. (Thanks, Colin.)
• Zack Exley has some strong advice for the campaigns: "don't hire an Internet person." He's been getting increasingly frustrated with people asking him about Internet people they can hire, and has been telling them "No, don't hire an Internet guy.. you need to make your senior leaders, campaigners & organizers responsible for the Internet just as they're responsible for everything else. The Internet is the biggest, greatest opportunity you have-so why would you outsource it to some Internet person you'll just stick in a closet anyways?... Don’t take that 'Director of Internet Communications' job. Take the 'Director of Communications' job."

The Candidates on the Web

• Want John Edwards to come to your city? Demand him! The Edwards campaign is using Eventful -- the site that lets you "demand" an appearance by a politician or a musician -- to run a competition called "Demand and Be Heard," in which the city that demands him the most over the next month will get a speaking appearance. Demanders are also being encouraged to submit a question to Edwards, and at the event he will answer ten questions from the winning city. This will make Edwards the second candidate, after Ron Paul, to show up at an event that originated on Eventful. Right now, Los Angeles is the leading city with 126 people demanding an appearance, followed by Cocoa, Florida, which has 83 demands. Who knew Cocoa was such a hotbed of Edwards support?

In Case You Missed It...

Micah Sifry points to Charles Pierce's article, "Mud in the Digital Age," from this Sunday's Boston Globe. The article describes the current state of politics in which everything is "hyper-connected and hyper-accelerated, with many more people participating and far less top-down control."

Micah also links to a strong statement in support net neutrality released by John Edwards on Friday, an issue which Edwards says "goes to the heart and soul of democracy."