The Web on the Candidates

• In an email unleashed in the wee hours of the morning -- mine came in at 1:33 a.m. -- Hillary Clinton let it be known that come Saturday she'll be rallying around Barack Obama, effectively ending her 16-month bid for the Democratic nomination (though am I right that she never actually uses the words "end," "quit," or "suspend" in her note?) And then there were two (major party candidates)...

• Clintonite Lanny Davis has reportedly taken to the Interweb to launch a "Hillary for VP" campaign. What to make of the fact that he's chosen womenforfairpolitics.com as the forum for making his case for an Obama-Clinton ticket?

• Over at the hub of grassroots conservatism that is FreeRepublic.com, the reactions to John McCain's Tuesday night speech from Louisiana tended towards less than complimentary. A sample: "We need to start a fund for a speech coach for John."

• Speaking of speeches, in his address Tuesday, Obama got almost biblical with it when discussing what his clinching the Democratic nod might mean to history: "[G]enerations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick...; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." That sort of rhetoric may well be the subject of both critique and criticism in the coming months, so keep an eye on "Is Barack Obama the Messiah?," a thoughtful blog on the topic.

• One of my favorite things to do before I go out for a run is to load up my iPod with selections from the Conversation's Network’s IT Conversations, a treasure trove of free audio content from geeks, hackers, and tech-minded thinkers. David Weinberger reports that CN has launched a new channel that will deliver similar goods on the ’08 presidential race.

The Candidates on the Web

• "You know, you could have just emailed this" -- Obama spokesperson Bill Burton’s reaction to the McCain campaign’s hand-delivery of an invitation to a series of joint townhall events modeled after those Barry Goldwater and John Kennedy planned for the 1964 campaign.

• The new new johnmccain.com is a celebration of Swiss graphic design: bold lines, gridded layouts, and clean fonts. And with its sunburst elements and soft color palette, it's also remarkably familiar. Sam Stein has the goods. (My fellow typography geeks: I’m 99% sure that the font the new McCain site is kicking is Trebuchet MS. That MS stands for Microsoft, so start our "McCain’s a PC" talk...now!)

• The tiny bit of this Wall Street Journal article that I can read without a subscription seems to imply that the huge network of small* donors that the Obama campaign assiduously knit together for their primary challenge will reward them will all the cash they'll need for the general. There's gold in them there "shallow" pockets.

In Case You Missed It...

Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain, author of the new "The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It," is the kind of speaker who can make talking malware and appliance tethering a laugh-a-minute good time. Micah Sifry notes that Jonathan will be joining the lineup for the upcoming PdF conference as Day 2's keynoter.

*Somehow the word "small" in this item on the Obama donor network got dropped along the way. I added it back in.