Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.

The use of Twitter as a discovery vehicle for raw political intelligence takes another step today with Election Journal, a project by Republican election watchdog Mike Roman. The site is using Twitter, Flickr, and Google Maps to cover primary election day in Philadelphia, with Twittering correspondents stationed around the city.

Hillary Clinton's MyPA won't change the way the campaign spends money in Pennyslvania, but it's a neat idea nonetheless.

As fundraising gets more and more transparent, it's important to learn how to read between the lines. As pathbreaking as the Obama campaign has been, they are a step back from the transparency of the Dean bat, which at least gave us real dollar figures in addition to a total number of donors. Neither could beat the transparency gold standard set by Ron Paul, who updated via a real-time XML+Flash element that was scraped for analytics. Moreover, when the Paul campaign bulk uploaded offline contributions, they told people. The Obama "bat" turns out to be an indecipherable mix of real and fake data.

Today, when hooked up to an in-store wifi network, I happened upon something pretty interesting: the HillaryClinton.com homepage was geared almost exclusively to the state of Indiana, with no less than four prominent mentions above the fold.

(Correction? See update.)

If you're a Republican (like me), it's time to grab the Rolaids again.

According to publicly available donor data on BarackObama.com, the Obama campaign has already received more than one million individual donations in March. Obama had received 727,972 donations in his record-breaking $55 million February. And we still have a week to go in the month.

Last week, the McCain campaign announced a break from the BC'04 command-and-control model in the political department. There will be no political director, and instead authority will be devolved to the states and regions.

What does this mean for technology and the McCain campaign?

My posts on the Republican online campaign are sometimes prodding, but in at least one area, John McCain laps the competition: using his site to tell his story to first-time visitors and undecided voters.

I was really struck by this visiting the site today, on the 35th anniversary of McCain's release as a POW.

How does John McCain go up against the $3 million-per-email Obama machine and the $2 million-per-email Clinton machine? It's a big question with serious implications for the future of the Republican Party. And the answer is not incrementalism.

According to my initial projections off this crowdsourced spreadsheet of Obama donations I set up after the Wisconsin victory, Obama has already raised at least $45 million for February and is on track to raise $60 million for the month.