I believe "I Am Voting Republican" marks the official beginning of the 2008 Presidential Elections.

The online right bickers over the wisdom of holding a candidate responsible for a bustling online community; can Google Trends predict election winners?; Mayhill Fowler reveals the methods behind her two big scoops; a look at how Hillary Clinton and new media got along in throughout the primary campaign; and more.

I'll be covering the primary on 2/5, in Boston using a Nokia N95-3 cellphone to stream live over the AT&T 3G network using Qik, Mogulus and Seesmic. I had an amazing time broadcasting by wandering around up in New Hampshire. Looking forward to Tuesday.

I love political videos on YouTube as much as anyone, but sometimes the filmmaker in me yearns for something more than one- or two-minute voter-generated videos in support of one candidate or against another. The political web can be so hyper-focused on the moment that I’m still surprised when folks take a step back and produce in-depth videos and analyses about what makes voters tick.

Yet two projects -- Purple States and Hope for Change -- do just this.

This is the Mark Cuban theory applied to online politics. Read on.

A little bird dropped something off via email the other day that I thought you guys might be interested in — it's a new twist on the classic political house party fundraiser.

Here's an interesting little feature that the Biden campaign has just started using — a tool that can combine several video clips into a single embed, even if they originate on different video hosting sites. Instead of displaying just one clip at a time, a Searchles channel embed creates an array of videos from which people can choose. Most significantly, once the content is embedded in a page, it will automatically update as new videos are added to the channel. This creates a widget-like way to actively push new content out to supporters' sites, which makes a Searchles channel much more than just a video mashup tool. More details and a sample after the break.

Earlier today, Josh linked to a piece on the excellent website Spot-on that finds a Democratic connection to the "Gays for Giuliani" video that came out (hah!) last week. Specifically, author Scott Olin Schmidt points to the fact that the site mentioned at the end of the video is registered to Mike Rogers, who writes for Huffington Post in addition to his own site and who has been controversial for outing Republicans in the past.

The YouTube debate may not have revolutionized politics, but it sure as hell was more of a pleasure to watch than your average political event. I'd read both hype and skepticism in the days beforehand, and I suspect that ultimately the new format will have a bigger effect on the debates themselves than on the political process. Still, it brought home the hollowness of much of our scripted political speech, since those candidates who could break through the rhetoric and talk with a human voice really stood out. And it demonstrated the real potential of citizen politics — sometimes a million monkeys banging away on keyboards WILL produce quality.

I'd just as soon not bring this up, as I've probably had beers with most of the people involved with this topic. But I feel that the cause of good, solid reporting on what Presidential eCampaignmeisters is worth setting the record straight.

Jonathan Martin brings up MittTV as an interesting example of Mitt going around the "media filter," a la HillaryHub. This isn't the first time I've seen MittTV signed out in writeups of Romney's website, and every time I have to ask, "Why?"

What is MittTV? It's Mitt Romney's videos on his website, draped in a custom player and a zingy name. But who isn't posting videos to the Web and YouTube? A number of candidates are even using their name and "TV" in the branding! Here's BarackTV and Hillary TV. Now, Romney's folks have been more aggressive about posting news clips of their guy to their YouTube channel, which is just smart strategy, but that's about the only differentiator to this that I can see.

Meanwhile, another worthwhile Romney effort, the Sign Up America campaign which signed up 30,000 supporters in 24 hours, didn't get as much play in the media. But over the long run, it's stuff like this -- the boring game of inches of recruiting volunteers and donors -- that has the greater impact.