The Web on the Candidates

• Fear of Macaca? Videos of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani making gaffes have been circulating to potentially damaging effect. Romney's video, in which he seems to equate volunteer military service with working for his campaign, was shot (actually, it's just audio) at a campaign stop in Iowa. In Giuliani's video, in which he compares himself to the 9/11 rescue workers ("I'm one of them"), Giuliani is speaking at press conference. But while the George Allen/Macaca video captured an unguarded Allen speaking off the cuff at a fundraiser, these captured candidates speaking on the record, directly to cameras. The macaca video hit because someone happened to shoot it and upload it, and others took notice and it began to spread virally. In these cases, however, it didn't take a tracker to spot the videos and promote them; instead, an online, distributed network is efficiently spreading them upward making them into a bigger and bigger issue.
• In other video news, voter-generated videos attacking Rudy Giuliani are continuing to gain viewers.
  
  
  
  
  
  As the above chart shows, both the "Gays For Giuliani" video and the "Rudy Giuliani on the 9/11 Rescue Workers" videos have been making they're way up the YouTube ladder. Keep your eye on them.

• Matt Stoller notes that Barack Obama is "getting killed by female voters" and points to comments from Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher and MyDD's Melissa Ryan for evidence. Hamsher, writing about the Obama campaign's private meeting with bloggers at Yearly Kos, saw the campaign instinctively ask male bloggers over female bloggers to attend. "Much like advertisers who think we're not 'serious,' the organizations that support, promote and sustain men -- which are completely external to the blogosphere -- are a much bigger problem than Duncan or Markos's linking habits." Ryan also sees these problems as "external rather than internal." "As a woman I'm in the minority but none of my male blogger colleagues have ever attempted to discourage, dismiss, or silence me... Women have told me that they're to intimidated to comment and post diaries on political blogs. I think that reluctance comes from a society that discourages women from participating in politics."
• We get around: techPresident co-founders Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej have a new piece up in the Politico detailing how the Republicans are still lagging behind the Democrats in utilizing the Internet. And techPresident contributor Fred Stutzman is quoted in Newsweek's cover story about Facebook. Congrats Fred!

In Case You Missed It...

The Republican CNN/YouTube debate is back on, thanks in large part to the SavetheDebate.com team's efforts.