This year has seen two controversies surrounding online political attacks that were designed to look voter-generated, but were actually produced by people indirectly connected to campaigns. In one, the producer and campaign fared no ill consequences and the work went viral. In the other, the producer and campaign are dealing with a hail of negative publicity and a defunct website. If both of these incidents are superficially similar, why are we calling one a breakthrough and the other a scandal?

With all the attention being paid to how much money the candidates are raising online, I think we need to better understand what “online fundraising” means.  Does it just include funds that are solicited and fulfilled online, or does it also include any funds submitted through the candidates’ online contribution forms, regardless of how solicited?  Or what if people mail in a check based on an email solicitation?  You see, this is not such a simple question.

Further, while we tend to focus on online campaign strategies in isolation from other campaign strategies, that view is already dated.  The boundaries between online and offline campaign strategies are blurred, at a minimum, and obliterated at most.  One only need look at the spike in Obama’s YouTube views following the extensive coverage CNN and the rest of the media gave to the 1984 video to see that offline developments drive online activity.

So let me suggest a typology for online fundraising:

1. The solicitation and fulfillment are both online
2. The solicitation is offline and the fulfillment is online
3. The solicitation is online and the fulfillment is offline

YouTube news and politics editor Steve Grove has a great interview up on YouTube with Phil de Vellis (a.k.a. "ParkRidge47") on how and why he made the now famous "Vote Different"/Hillary 1984 video. The whole phenomenon of voter-generated content couldn't have a better "spokesperson" (if such a thing is even possible).

The Web on the Candidates

There's a new GOP Bloggers straw poll out, and this month Fred Thompson is the conservatives' fave.   However, the Hotline's Blogometer is starting to notice a pattern: "a new name is mentioned, bloggers fall in love, compromising facts are revealed, and a new name is mentioned."  While Thompson came out on top this month, last month it was Rudy Giuliani, in January it was Mitt Romney, and in December it was Newt Gingrich.  Who's your pick for April?

PrezVid's Peter Hauck links to a remix of Katie Couric's 60 Minutes interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards. The Blue State's Todd Haskins made a montage of Couric's questions, removing the Edwards' responses.  The result makes Couric look particularly aggressive, asking a lot of "Some people say..." questions. 

The Web on the Candidates

He got it wrong: Yesterday morning, Ben Smith of the Politico reported that John Edwards was suspending his campaign due to his wife Elizabeth's recurrence of cancer. As we know now, Edwards is staying in. Smith's source got it wrong, and Smith wrote a good piece describing how he got the story and the differences between reporting for a newspaper and for a blog. "Though I’ve spent the last several years at major newspapers – the New York Observer and the New York Daily News most recently – I’ve done much of my reporting on blogs, and have developed an instinct to let my readers know whatever I know, as soon as I know it... But the scale of this story was simply too big to report that way, to share information with high but imperfect confidence – and without making that level of confidence crystal clear. I should have waited for a second source, or hedged the item much more fully. Or simply waited for the news conference like everybody else." Hat tip to Smith for owning up to his error so quickly and openly. Very bloggy of him.

Eric Kleefeld at TPMCafe writes that a new Zogby Interactive poll finds that the "Vote Different" anti-Hillary video had no effect on two-thirds of of likely Democratic voters, and "the remaining one third were three times as likely to prefer Clinton after seeing it."

The Web on the Candidates

Comments from around the web:

Ben Smith of the Politico: "The web consultant who left Obama's web consulting firm after taking credit for the Vote Different ad has been shadowed in the past by accusations of 'dirty tricks.'"

Jerome Armstrong at MyDD: "I know the founders of Blue State Digital, and this was a petty move on their part..."

Hotline On Call: "So -- they fired the guy for creating a creative wonderpiece."

My hat is off to Arianna Huffington and her crew for figuring out who made the "Vote Different" Hillary 1984 video mash-up, and even better for getting Phil de Vellis, its author, to say more about his reasons for making the video.

It's become a parlor game for the chattering class: Who is ParkRidge47? TechPresident blogger David All has a great post up on his personal site that, at least for me, pretty definitively closes the door on the author being a mischief-making Republican. He tracked down an email exchange between ParkRidge47 and a person who had tried to post a video response on YouTube and had it rejected, and the language PR47 uses makes clear that this person is no friend of the GOP. Well, I have a different theory, which is that it's a professional--the language in our email exchange, and the proficiency of the technical work, makes it unlikely this is a kid. So, which professional?

The Web on the Candidates

The search for parkridge47: It's been two weeks since techPresident's Micah Sifry first posted his email exchange with "parkridge47," creator of the Obama/Clinton "Vote Different" video, but the search for his or her true identity continues. In the video's wake, Micah and PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej have been quoted and interviewed all over the place, including CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Townhall.com.

Jeff Jarvis has an idea: let's videotape ourselves asking questions of the presidential candidates, upload them to YouTube, and tag them PREZCONFERENCE. "This way, we’ll see which questions the candidates answer and which they don’t. In the UK, Conservative leader David Cameron answers five questions a week, three of them selected by the voters. We need to hear our candidates answer our questions here." He offers five examples of such videos, taken at at the VON conference at San Jose.

NY1, the all-news cable channel of New York City, has gotten a response from Hillary Clinton to the "Vote Different" 1984 video. They report that she isn't worried about the video's impact. I'm told that this was an off-the-cuff response on her part.