The Web on the Candidates

• Veterans from Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign have teamed up to produce a new user-generated advertising venture called GeniusRocket (I’m not sure about that name. Must it be a Rocket?). The team includes venture capitalist Mark Walsh, current John Edwards Senior Advisor Joe Trippi, EchoDitto founder Nicco Mele, and former Dean director of internet communications and current Edwards staffer Mathew Gross. The idea is that advertisers will solicit marketing solutions from the site’s community. Amateur creators can then earn money by soliciting projects and having them approved by the advertisers or the community. The group behind the venture were certainly part of the huge change in how politics is practiced online, but I wonder if they are sufficiently tapped into the currents of pop culture to make this work? We will see.

• In a new video, the Politico’s videoblogger James Kotecki looks for the worst videos from the Republican candidates. His selection: a new video from Rudy Giuliani’s “Running with Rudy” series. After mocking the “Wayne’s World”-esque opening sequence, James essentially rips the video to shreds. It’s a really funny video that evokes James’ early work(!), including — finally! — the return of his candidate-on-a-stick schtick.

• The Kaiser Foundation's health08.org website, which we reviewed when it launched this summer, has added a new side-by-side chart that makes it easy to compare the candidates’ health care proposals. It's clear that a lot of research went into this site; it shows a flair for policy details that many of these comparisons lack. With these charts health08 is continuing to lead the way in issue-based election coverage, offering a substantive alternative to breathless reports about fundraising and polls.

• The Huffington Post's Fundrace, a searchable database of who's making campaign donations that offers hours of edification and enjoyment (kind of looking through US magazine on the airplane, except, um, not), has added a new feature. You can now search for donations by company, making this publicly-available but hard-to-find information even more accessible.

The Candidates on the Web

• Two days ago Barack Obama sent out an email asking supporters to help close the fundraising gap between him and Hillary Clinton. “The situation here is simple. We are $2.1 million behind. We must close that gap right now. I need you to make a donation of $50,” wrote “Barack.” The campaign has sent out more emails since, including, as techPresident’s Nancy Scola noted, some that strangely appeared to come from regular ol’ supporters. Two days later, Obama's homepage trumpets that he’s raised almost $1.5 million. That’s not a bad a number, and MyDD’s Jonathan Singer thinks that it, plus the endorsement of Massachusetts Governor (and former Clinton official) Deval Patrick, “sends a loud and clear message that, regardless of what media coverage and polling would have us believe, this thing isn’t over by a long shot.”

In Case You Missed It…

10Questions.com, our new online presidential forum, has launched to wide acclaim. Check in here to learn more about it.

Nancy Scola received a generic, “personal” email from the Barack Obama campaign that she hopes will mark the end of the face-off for who can send the most informal emails.

Following up on her previous post about the campaigns not giving supporters power, Zephyr Teachout thinks there may be some more technical clues that distinguish those campaigns in which you have the power and those in which you don’t.