The Candidates on the Web

• The third MTV/MySpace Presidential Dialogue, starring John McCain, is tonight at 7pm. We’re big fans of these events, which are being held at colleges across the country, are streamed online, and allow the public to ask questions via IM and rate the performance of the candidates in real time. John Edwards and Barack Obama, the first two candidates to participate, were well received by their apparently liberal audiences. Tonight’s is at Southern New Hampshire University in New Hampshire. It will be interesting to see how McCain fares.

• Another reason to watch: I’ll be there! Weather permitting, I’m heading up to Manchester later today. And since last week’s debate liveblog was so much fun, I’ll be liveblogging tonight as well. We’re using software that lets you, the readers, interact with us in real time. It’s great fun, and we highly recommend that you tune in to techPresident at 7pm tonight.

• Dirty tricks in campaigns have been around forever, and so it’s no surprise to find them cropping up online too. The Des Moines Register reports on some sneaky emails circulating in Iowa, including one purporting to be from a field director for Mitt Romney that told recipients that one of Rudy Giuliani’s advisers was a “pedophile priest.” The field director has denied sending the email, though it came from an account with his name.

The Web on the Candidates

• On Friday, YouTube news and politics editor Steve Grove called on the YouTube community to respond to the the Republican CNN/YouTube debate (David All has a quick review of the video here). The video coincided with the release of a cool post-debate page on YouTube: you can quickly go to any of the questions and post your own response. You can also respond to specific debate questions, though there are curiously only two responses for each question at the moment. With Grove asking for feedback in the face of zero public participation in the selection process, it seems like YouTube is doing their best to win back a public angry with their partner CNN.

• Silicon Valley writer Randall Stross writes in the New York Times that Google is the 21st century General Motors, a crucial pit stop for for presidential candidates. Videos of these visits are always posted on YouTube, though they are probably too long for our attention span-starved culture to sit through. “By the time the next campaign cycle rolls around in 2011, YouTube’s influence on the culture may be so complete that a 45-minute linear video of a question-answer session will seem to most people to be about 43 minutes too long,” Stross says, and I’m not sure if he thinks that’s a good thing or not. Those are really long videos. In an aside, Stross wonders if YouTube views are count just when a video is played, or when it is completed. As a TubeMogul study has shown, YouTube only counts full views.

• Political blogging sleuth and outside advisor to Fred Thompson William Beutler turns his investigative eye to three Republican-supporting fundraising sites, making an “early comparative assessment” of Rightroots, Big Red Tent, and Slatecard. (Slatecard is run by techPresident contributor David All, and Rightroots is run in part by techPresident contributors Patrick Ruffini and Mike Turk, who is also an outside advisor to the Thompson campaign. Got that?) He decides that while all of the sites do their jobs well, Slatecard is the best of the bunch. “It’s more intuitive, it offers some unique features that are still fairly intuitive, and it appears to be the most active,” Beutler writes. In all fairness, however, Slatecard’s modest success is partly a result of its use as the primary fundraising vehicle for Virginia Congressional candidate Kevin O’Neill.

• David All responded quickly to Beutler’s post on the Slatecard blog with a few clarifications and marketing points. He also directly addresses some of Beutler’s critiques and questions, including one about a “Defeat Radical Islam” badge Slatecard invites people to put on their websites. It shows the Universal No symbol over a star and crescent. “The war against radical Islam is not, the last time I checked, a war against all Muslims. But that’s what the badge implies,” Beutler wrote. All says he still open to changing that particular image (I hope he is). “We had another idea of using an AK-47 to represent it holding up the Islam flag. Thoughts?” That’s a little better, I think.

• The web is great for connecting people to politics in unprecedented ways, but it also tends to amplify some of the worst in human behavior. Case in point: the misogynistic insults being slung at Hillary Clinton all over the web. “Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in ‘bitch,’ ‘slut,’ ‘skank,’ ‘whore’ and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language, writes Jonathan Tilove at the Newhouse News Service. Even we internet utopians have to admit that web can get pretty ugly.

In Case You Missed It…

TechPresident’s resident Huckwatcher Zephyr Teachout announces that with a month to go until Iowa, she’s switching from watching Huckabee to watching the detectives, and from now on she’ll focus on sites comparing candidates’ records.

Micah Sifry went to the New York State Board of Elections website looking for information about registering to vote. It says that the next primary is September 18, 2007. That is, more than two months ago.

David All takes a look at YouTube politics and news editor Steve Grove’s debate wrap-up video, in which Grove comments about the CNN blowback and asks for feedback from the community for any future debates.

After the YouTube-CNN Debate, David spent some time in the “Spin Room” talking with folks about their thoughts on the Republican debate. Check out David’s videos of Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter, Patrick Ruffini, Robert Bluey, Mary Katharine Ham, James Kotecki, Jose Antonio Vargas, Meghan McCain, Charlie Smith, and, wait for it… Chuck Norris.

Last week Chris Dodd’s campaign sent out another email that helps them reclaim their throne as the champions of the plain-text-I’m-just-following-up-on-what-so-and-so-said email wars.

Earlier this week Zephyr argued that Mike Huckabee is running the best web campaign, but she’s gotten some flak, mostly from Ron Paul folks, which has prompted her to clarify: Paul’s campaign is the best web campaign, and it has vastly increased his likelihood of influencing the election. But why does she think Huckabee’s is better than Obama, Edwards, or Clinton? Read on.