The Web on the Candidates

• The growing use of broadband Internet is helping Barack Obama raise more money from more people than ever before, writes the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas. Not only did about a third of Obama's second-quarter earnings of $32.8 million come from online donations, but 90 percent of those donations were under $100, and half were $25 or less. Even MyDD's Jerome Armstrong, a Dean Internet advisor in 2003, calls it "the largest grass-roots campaign in history for this stage of a presidential race." Beyond the appeal of the candidate, part of the reason for the big numbers may come from increased broadband access. African American adults' connection rates have nearly tripled from 14 percent in 2005 to 40 percent this year, according to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Folks online are doing things they've never done before," Rainie says.
• The New York Times reports that, in addition to raising money in the form of small donations, Obama's campaign "has also employed novel tactics — like counting sales of $5 speech tickets or $4.50 Obama key chains as individual contributions — to pump up his numbers and transform grass-roots enthusiasm into more useful forms of support." The combination of traditional fundraising and counting paraphernalia sales toward his numbers has combined to give Obama more money ($58.4 million) than any candidate in either party. Another plus: in addition to bringing in more money, merchandise sales add names to the donor rolls.

The Candidates on the Web

• Joe Biden is preparing for next week's YouTube/CNN debate, in which the candidates will respond to questions submitted by voters on YouTube, by asking his supporters to upload videos of the same question, reports Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal. Biden's campaign is betting that if enough supporters take notice of the question (which is, essentially, "Beyond getting our troops out of Iraq, what’s your plan to ensure we don’t leave a mess behind?"), the debate planners will have no choice but to include it. We will see...
• John Edwards is currently on his "Road to One America" tour, in which he is traveling to eight states in two days to "shine a bright spotlight on the issue of poverty in America." He's using a bevy of online tools to involve supporters and help them track his activities during the tour, including posting SMS and Twitter updates to and from supporters (including opt-in audio SMS messages and geo-targeted text messages), uploading photos to Flickr, and posting videos on YouTube. The campaign has consistently used all available online tools and embraced the distributed nature of the web to get their message out, and this is no exception. However, we do wonder why they haven't built one page -- on the Edwards site or elsewhere -- that unites all of this disparate voter-generated content. A page aggregating supporters' Flickr photos, uploaded videos, and texts á la George Miller's Ask George project would be a strong indicator of Edwards' grassroots support.
• Thanks to a popular contest on Eventful (sponsored by the Edwards campaign), in which towns are competing to bring John Edwards to their area, Edwards' Eventful numbers have substantially increased. Edwards' numbers started their ascent around June 18th, when the competition was announced, and began a steeper climb around the second week in July, when Shawn Dixon of Columbus, KY began rallying his neighbors to demand John Edwards visit their small town. The contest ends tomorrow, and it still looks like Columbus -- in first place with 1,671 demands -- will be the winner.

In Case You Missed It...

TechPresident welcomes Morra Aarons as our latest blogger. She's the political director of Blogher, the largest network of women bloggers in the world, and in her inaugural post she offers facts and figures about the role of women online in the 2008 election.

Also, this year's BlogHer conference is July 27-29 in Chicago. The deadline to register is this Friday, July 20th.