The Web on the Candidates

• Writer, teacher, and consultant Clay Shirky has been making the rounds supporting his fantastic new book, Here Comes Everybody (our own Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej reviewed it). He recently chatted with Salon’s Farhad Manjoo, letting loose insights about Barack Obama’s ability to “to take volunteers who are really interested in his campaign and to get them to go out and get votes,” explaining why all of this money being raked in by the campaigns is still going to TV ads, and asking whether all of the voter-generated content (we’re looking at you, Obama Girl) is good for the campaign. Essential reading.

• Speaking of Obama Girl, a poll from HCD Research suggests that 51% of Democrats are “irritated” by her her, and 41% are “embarrassed.” Maybe it’s time to hang up the hotpants.

• The folks at Slate have been pulling a “Hillary Clinton Deathwatch” for the last week now, every daily judging the likelihood that she’ll capture the nomination. Yesterday, thanks to former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton’s endorsement of Barack Obama, she was at 9.5 percent, down almost half a point from Tuesday’s 9.9 percent. In the absence of much real campaign news (bowling?), this is sort of fun, though we wish Slate would make an even more fun, more interactive graphic or chart.

• Jeff Jarvis, who is a Hillary backer (and who hated Slate’s DeathWatch), is taken by Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a government Chief Technology Officer. He’s asked for nominees and gotten some interesting names in response…

The Candidates on the Web

• Apparently it wasn’t enough for 1) Hillary Clinton to produce just one “3 am” ad, or 2) for Barack Obama to be the only candidate to plagiarize satirize said ad. Now Hillary has produced another ad using the same imagery, this time about — hide under the bed! — the mortgage crisis. In response, John McCain has produced an ad using the exact same imagery to say that it’s he who will solve this thing. Scared yet?

• Who said John McCain doesn’t do social media? Over the last week his campaign has been running “The John McCain Facebook Challenge” encouraging every Republican on Facebook to become a supporter of McCain. As our charts show, it’s been a moderately successful endeavor; McCain has seen a 5.1% spike in supporters in the last week, a bit higher rate than than the 2.6% rise enjoyed by Obama and the 1.9% by Hillary. But McCain still only has a bit more than 100,000 supporters; Obama has 740,000.

• TechRepublican mastermind and techPresident contributor David All breaks the news that Matt Lira, formerly Rep. Eric Cantor’s web guy, is now the webmaster for the John McCain campaign (he also worked under techPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini at the RNC; tP truly does rule you). Cantor is well respected in Republican techie circles; let’s hope he sprinkles some magic dust on McCain’s web presence.

• Ben Smith at the Politico posts word that Obama has raised $40 million from 442,000 donors -- 218,000 of whom are first-timers. While it's lower that his monster $55 million haul in February, it's still very impressive. No word on Clinton or McCain yet.

In Case You Missed It…

Off The Bus’ Kristin Gorski writes that visual artists mobilizing for Barack Obama are producing images of the candidate and dispersing them through Web sites and blogs, attaining mass reach into a key voting demographic: their peers. And these are some pretty cool images: