The Web on the Candidates

• Forget the Election. Let's Just Have Them Compete on "Dancing with the Stars": America is using these relatively quiet days of summer to carefully weigh John McCain and Barack Obama's differing visions for putting America back at the cutting edge of scientific innova...no, not really. Sigh. We're busy talking celebrity this and celebrity blah blah blah blah. The RNC has taken to the web to hammer home the idea that the Democratic candidate is all hat and no cattle, all Paris Hilton and no Nicky Hilton, the political equivalent of cotton candy. This go 'round, the gimmick is Who Said It, Celebrity Edition -- a quiz that tests your knowledge of whether it was Barack Obama or George Clooney who asked about the price of arugala in Iowa. Obama answered back the recent criticism with the Low Road Express. We're thinking the audience for the site is the press. Team B.O. is planting a flag that says "John Kerry might not have fought back, but I will" -- and most importantly from the campaign's perspective, training the media to expect a response to criticisms from camp Obama. Just in case you can't get enough of this celebrity talk, though, the Washington Post's Garance Franke-Ruta rounds up the reaction in the gossiposphere. #

• RPCV GOTV: Sprinkled across the U.S.A. are nearly 200,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers, and now some of them are trying to bring home some votes for Barack Obama. The group aims to organize about 10,000 RPCVs who will each bring 10 voters to the polls for the Democratic candidate. The organizer behind the group is Tom Leonard, an Internet consultant who has served as in marketing roles at Netscape and AOL and once served as a Peace Corp volunteer in Fiji. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Phone Bank of Guinness Proportions: If it works, it will be the biggest phone bank in the history of the entire world. Ever. Of all time. Seriously. Attendees at Obama's acceptance speech at Denver's Invesco Field on the last night of the Democratic National Convention will be asked to whip out their cell phones to call or text message some of the 55 million unregistered voters that the campaign has identified over the last couple of years. Given that the stadium is expected to hold 75,000 people for the event, everyone just needs to call 66 people that night to get the job done. (We're thinking it might be a wee bit tough for that many people to get a cell signal all at the same time, but hey, we're not network engineers. What do we know.) #

• The Price of Ads Today: Contra conventional wisdom, McCain dominates Obama online according to at least one metric: Google AdWords data ads tied to the search term "John McCain" cost nearly twice as much as those tied to "Barack Obama." #

TechCongress and Beyond

• Coming Soon to a Legislature Near You: The Democratic side of the House Education committee has released a snappy movie-trailer style short video promoting the upcoming premiere consideration on the House floor of the Higher Education Opportunity Act. (More on S. 851 from the good people over at GovTrack.) Nice to see Hill folk getting creative with their legislatin'. Makes us actually want to see the bill when it comes out. #

• Same Old, Same Old: CIO Insight's Ed Cone riffs off a recent Bivings Group report to let us know that, when it comes to their websites, our aught eight crop Senate candidates are playing it very safe. #