John Edwards's upcoming trip to Columbus, Kentucky signals the emergence of a whole new trend in American politics: “candidate relationship management.” Think of it as the flip side of CRM, constituent or consumer relationship management, where organizations use software tools to communicate with and keep track of their base. Instead, in a variety of ways, voters are using new Web-based platforms to act collectively to foster candidates and actions that they desire.

The Web on the Candidates

Steve Grove, YouTube's politics editor, posted a new video explaining YouTube's approach to politics. It's basically a greatest-hits package with clips from Mitt Romney, John Edwards, and John McCain's spotlight videos. Grove also shows us some bits from supporter videos, including one from Bryan Barton, who mashed up videos of Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter with a Nintendo game (Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, to be exact). The point of all this? The show video's (and YouTube's) primacy in the presidential race.

The Washington Post has launched a new "Campaign Tracker" tool that takes information from campaigns, media reports, and Google Maps to map the locations of candidate events (excluding, of course, fundraisers). It's a pretty basic tool at the moment, but it provides a searchable events database that reaches back to January, and gives a quick snapshot of where all of the candidates are at a particular moment. (via the Bivings Report)