The Web on the Candidates

James Kotecki has been offering the presidential candidates free advice about using online video but he's disappointed in the one-way conversations most of them are conducting (read: they won't respond to him). John Edwards and Newt Gingrich wrote text responses to his videos analyzing their online campaigns; Joe Biden's campaign subscribed to Kotecki's videos. No other candidate has yet responded.

Jeff Jarvis responds to an article in the Politico by techPresident's Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej in which they compare the presidential candidates' use of video to the online videos of British MP David Cameron webcameron, in which the head of the Conservative party posts disarming and off-the-cuff videos that take place in his kitchen, on work trips, or anywhere else he happens to be. Compared to Cameron, Jarvis calls John McCain's videos "overproduced" and "overlong"; "Obama is spending too much time showing himself in front of big crowds and too little time just talking to us... Hillary is more casual but not candid. Yet they are all reveling in their ablity to make their own soundbites instead of being subject to the clipping whims of some network TV news editor."

The Web on the Candidates

TPMCafe features a post from the Nation's Katha Pollitt in which she deviates from netroots orthodoxy by attempting to understand why Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen's presence on the John Edwards campaign was controversial. "The man is running for president, not king of the blogosphere... He wants -- he needs -- the votes of people who have never looked at a blog in their lives, who are deeply religious, culturally staid, and easily offended in about a thousand ways." she writes.

The Candidates on the Web

Possible presidential candidate Wesley Clark has joined forces with VoteVets.org, a Iraq and Afghanistan war vet group, to produce StopIranWar.com, a site that protests President Bush's "saber rattling" toward Iran and asks Americans to sign a petition against military force in Iran.