The Web on the Candidates

• The big news in tech and politics is tonight's YouTube/CNN debate. The blogosphere and big media are buzzing about it, with some pundits repeating Howard Kurtz's false dichotomy of "are YouTube and other video websites really changing politics or just grabbing a lot of media attention." On his "Reliable Sources" show on CNN, Kurtz asked Ana Marie Cox whether the debate is democratic or a gimmick, to which Cox replied, "as much as I want to be cynical about it, I remember four years ago, Howie, talking to you about whether or not bloggers were gonna be an important factor in the election..." Meanwhile Election Geek, like other skeptics, doesn't see anything revolutionary here: "this thing won’t revolutionize politics, it probably won’t even be interesting television, but it has given all the Web sites and CNN itself endless chatter and chances to promote so it is good." But Jeff Jarvis at PrezVid sees some real potential in the new format. "The YouTube debates could fundamentally change the dynamics of politics in America, giving a voice to the people, letting us be heard by the powerful and the public, enabling us to coalesce around our interests and needs, and even teaching reporters who are supposed to ask questions in our stead how they should really do it." This could be a chance for CNN to show the public that the American public is smart, well-informed, and engaged. That, or "CNN could pick the dutiful, dull, obvious, sophomoric questions and make us look like a nation of dolts."
• About that debate: stay tuned for techPresident's first foray into online video! Our debut effort will gauge the reactions of a few of your favorite TP bloggers and some other stars of the video-blogosphere -- look for it soon after the debate.
• Despite the high-tech nature of tonight's debate, "less than a mile and a half from the Citadel... sits Cooper River Courts, a public housing project. Forget the Web. Never mind YouTube, the debate's co-sponsor. Here, owning a computer and getting on the Internet (through DSL or cable or Wi-Fi) is a luxury," the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas writes. The digital divide continues to exist in this country, and no presidential contenders have offered a strategy to bridge it, contends this site's founder, Andrew Rasiej. "Our presidential candidates may all have BlackBerrys, but they have no vision when it comes to bringing all our citizens to the 21st century," Rasiej says.
• On other fronts, Chris Bowers of Open Left (formerly of MyDD) finds it interesting "that so few bloggers who I remember making endorsements in 2003 have done so in 2007." (A previous version of the post was retracted, apparently because Bowers made assertions that turned out to be untrue, but he still sees a general trend.) He finds three reasons why progressive bloggers are, at this point, reluctant to endorse a candidate: the presence of netroots handlers within campaigns with real connections to the netroots, a desire for access to all of the campaigns, and a divided progressive community over which candidates to support. It could be that, more simply, there's no one to get really excited about.
• One conversation that spun off from Bowers' post centered on why, despite Clinton's generally negative reception in the blogosphere (as measured in straw polls and other stats), there isn't a lot of anti-Clinton blogging going on. Bowers found that only 1% of articles written on the DailyKos and MyDD over the last month are overtly anti-Clinton.

The Candidates on the Web

• Ron Paul has made the leap from bottom-tier Republican candidate to... bottom-tier Republican candidate with a feature in the New York Times Magazine. This is no doubt due in part to his ever-increasing online popularity. Last week the techblog TechCrunch looked at Paul's use of the web, calling it a "distributed web 2.0 campaign" (which was coined by the Bivings Report's Todd Zeigler last month), looking at his use of -- get ready -- blogging, Digg, Eventful, Facebook, Flickr, Meetup, MySpace, and YouTube. Paul isn't the first or only candidate to be making use of these platforms, but he's the only one who has successively strung them together to build a real networked campaign.
• Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois is partnering with Open Left to produce a citizen-centered experiment in drafting legislation. Starting tomorrow, he will be "engaging in a series of four nightly broadband policy discussions with the online community" to gather ideas for how Congress should promote broadband access. Echoing techPresident's call for America's first TechPresident, Durbin is starting with three principles: "Broadband access must be universal and affordable; We need to preserve an online environment for innovation; and We need to ensure that broadband technology enables more voices to be heard." Bravo.

In Case You Missed It...

John Edwards will be answering voters' questions after the debates on his web site, on MySpace, through Twitter, and using SMS. He'll also be answering the top two most-popular questions on Community Counts, the site dedicated to letting the YouTube community vote for its favorite debate submissions.

David All has five tips for Rudy Giuliani to step up his web presence.

There are now almost 3,000 video submissions for tonight's YouTube debate; here are a few of my favorites.