The Web on the Candidates

• Ben Smith, who covers the Democratic candidates for the Politico, writes about some unforeseen consequences of journalists using Facebook.  "When a campaign type is considering leaking to a reporter, couldn't the fact that you're "friends" on Facebook make the source queasy?," Smith asks.  There is certainly some illuminating data to be mined from the Facebook friends of reporters, staffers, and consultants; for example, "Obama insider Pete Giangreco has just a couple of reporter-friends, including Facebook wizard (434 friends, 330 more than [Smith]) Marc Ambinder."  Ben's solution is to get us at techPresident to use our legendary data-charting skills to create a map of these relationships.  We'll see what we can do, Ben.
• The GOP Bloggers blog runs monthly straw polls that, while unscientific, give a taste of how the Republican candidates are faring online.  One candidate is glaringly missing from this month's poll, however: Ron Paul.  "After my decision to include Ron Paul in the previous poll, I monitored (to the best of my ability) the efforts by Paul's online supporters. With the help of other bloggers, we discovered a sophisticated coordinated effort to spam the poll, obfuscate their actions, and even cheat the poll," writes blogger Matt Margolis.  This "coordinated effort," according to Margolis, may include Paul's communication director, Jesse Benton, and has caused the results to be "severely flawed and useless as a barometer."  Since Paul supporters have shown that they won't play nice, this month there's no Paul.     

The Candidates on the Web

• YouTube debate skeptic Mitt Romney has apparently embraced some aspect of the voter-generated content movement.  The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas reports that Romney is asking supporters to use Yahoo's Jumpcut.com, a video-editing site, to create a television ad for him.  They're being encouraged to mashup video clips, audio files, and photos (some are provided by the Romney campaign, but users can bring in their own media as well).  It's a pretty cool idea, shows that his more forward-thinking staff, or maybe his sons, may have gotten through to him on the tech stuff.   I know a certain snowman who might be interested in participating...
• Vargas also chats with Cyrus Krohn, the former director of Yahoo's election strategy who's now the the director of the RNC's eCampaign department.   One of his major tasks will be to tackle the perception that the Republicans are behind online, though we won't concede that they are.  "We can't just focus on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook," Krohn told Vargas. "My history with the Internet is with the portal space, with MSN and Yahoo. So to me, the question is, why are we focused on three or four sites and a list of blogs when we still need to figure out the value of portals in the political process? Yahoo Groups, for all intents and purposes, was the original MySpace."  Um, ok, except that my favorite band didn't get huge by setting up a Yahoo group.
• Chris Dodd just got a major endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, and his website now sports "firefighter yellow" to prove it.  The header graphic now features a photo of Dodd with -- you guessed it -- a bunch of firemen.  Also new to the site are individual state pages for early primary states and Connecticut, Dodd's home state.  He isn't the first candidate to do this, but it's evidence of the struggling candidate's commitment to staying in the race. 
• Elizabeth Edwards is known to show up on blogs to support her husband's campaign, and she's often quite candid in her posts and interviews.  But her recent comments about Hillary Clinton in an interview in Salon, and a New York Times' story about parents taking their kids on the campaign trail, have inspired a slight kerfuffle in the blogosphere.  Writing at the Silicon Valley Moms Blog, "Rebecca" told Elizabeth off.  "Elizabeth, I DON'T LIKE the choices you have made! TAKE YOUR KIDS HOME.  Get off the freakin' campaign trail.  Your husband is NOT going to be the candidate, and he is NOT going to be president."  Whoa.  There's lots more where that came from, with a bevy of comments backing up Elizabeth to boot.

In Case You Missed It...

An unexpected surprise: TechPresident was included in PC Magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites!

David All takes a look at the Spartan Internet Political Performance Index, which purports to gauge the candidates' online success based on 650 quantitative factors.  That's a lot of factors.