The Web on the Candidates

• Eyeon08’s Soren Dayton reminds conservatives that Hillary Clinton is “a big ole porker,” pointing to an article from economist Kevin Hassett article claiming that “If Dennis Hastert was the king of earmarks, Hillary Clinton was his queen.” In response, Dayton has proposed a Sunlight Foundation-style crowdsourcing project to identify Clinton’s earmarks and who is making money of them. He has great faith in the project, and thinks the press will go along. “If we get the facts, I think that these facts will get told on more than Fox.” How about some Google Maps and XML action too?

• Over the weekend the Washington Posts’ Jose Antonio Vargas proclaimed Barack Obama “king of social networking” for his presence on a multitude of social network sites. He’s gone way beyond Facebook and MySpace and showed up on sites like MiGente.com and BlackPlanet.com. TechPresident contributor Colin Delany was quoted in the piece. “Fact is, online you have to go where the audience is, and the online audience are on all these sites,” Colin said. Yesterday he clarified the quote on his site. Essentially, Colin says, candidates in smaller races with limited budgets don’t need to hit all of the niche sites. “In a congressional, state legislative or local race, niche social networking sites aren’t likely to yield enough supporters in the right places to be worth the time, but a MySpace profile may be a good investment.” It’s true; most congressional candidates with limited resources may not need to set up shop on GLEE.com (Gay, Lesbian and Everyone Else).

• PolitcsOnline has announced the winners of its “Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics” contest. Selected by subscribers to PoliticsOnline’s newsletter and visitors to its site, the winners are somewhat surprising and refreshingly international. They include GetUp, a kind of Australian MoveOn; Ron Paul; John Edwards; Gov2u.com , a Greek NGO; and Cafe Babel, which, as far as I can tell, is a new European citizen-media site (whose branding has to be fixed!).

• Yesterday staffers from Facebook hosted a discussion in Washington on using Facebook for politics, and the New York Times’ J.P. Freire took notes (as did techPresident's Michael Bassik). One interesting nugget: Facebook’s director of sales Josh Rahn said that out of Facebook’s 45 million users (they’re still growing by 200,000 users a day), 80 percent are of voting age. This means that, in smaller local races that are often decided by a handful of votes, a large group of Facebook supporters could come in handy. Attendees included representatives from advocacy groups, the DNC, the DCCC, and some Democratic Congressional offices. According to Freire, “Very few Republicans were present, aside from a lone Ron Paul campaign staff member and members of the Young Republican National Federation.” Maybe all the cool Republicans go to the Modern Media Strategies workshops.

• In addition to the news meme prematurely crowning Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, we’re now starting to see stories about her being allegedly “snippy.” The most recent came after her encounter in Iowa with someone questioning her vote to call Iran’s army a terrorist organization. “Clinton Gets Snippy With Iowan Over Iran,” an MSNBC headline read. Intrigued, Taylor Marsh watched a video of the encounter and discovered that Clinton wasn’t really being snippy had all. In fact, the video shows that Clinton was being overly fair to the speaker. The incident “illustrates the lengths to which people will go in this primary season to label Clinton as ‘harsh,’ ‘snippy,’ bitchy, overbearing, and that all time favorite adjective, polarizing,” Marsh writes. Sometimes, voter-generated videos can hurt a candidate, and other times they can give the lie to oft-repeated untruths in the media.

The Candidates on the Web

• Last week people who signed up for John Edwards’ text messaging campaign received a text telling them that they had a voicemail waiting for them. MyDD’s Todd Beeton called the number given and listened to a message from — no, not John Edwards — David Bonior, Edwards’ national campaign manager (I did the same, and I admit I was disappointed that I wasn’t hearing from Edwards himself, even if it was a recorded message). Bonior cited polls that place Edwards ahead of the top Republicans in head-to-head matchups. At the end, listeners could press “4” to forward the message to friends. The message may or may not have been effective — Beeton found the appeal to polls to be an act of desperation for a campaign that’s focused so heavily on policy — but the technology is cool. But Beeton saw the use of Bonior as too “inside baseball,” and I agree. These messages are far more effective when they come from the candidate, or in this case, his wife.

In Case You Missed It…

The candidates are by and large continuing to ignore Facebook’s Platform, writes Fred Stutzman

Tom Friedman wrote today that maybe the web has taken the steam out of activism and politics. Tom Belford fears he’s right.

Facebook is making some much-needed changes its groups feature that will , among other things, give administrators the chance to message all of their members. By changing the messaging policy, writes Michael Bassik, Facebook will soon find itself the center of activism online.