The Web on the Candidates

• Reviews of Matt Bai's book The Argument are still coming out. Jose Antonio Vargas writes the most recent one, generally giving the book about bloggers and billionaires aiming to remake the Democratic Party high marks. But while Bai does provide "a layered, colorful portrait of a party in transition," despite the book's thesis that the netroots and liberal billionaire philanthropists lack a convincing argument for change, Vargas finds that Bai advances no argument of his own. "Bai, despite writing an energetic and timely narrative, misses a big idea himself. Every day in the blogosphere -- often in crude, crass language, many times in careful, detailed analysis -- an argument is being laid out: against the war in Iraq, in support of minority groups and immigrants, for a government of the people."
• Back in 1972, when Karl Rove was working on the Nixon re-election campaign, "the merger of politics and technology was so new the Nixon campaign felt its use of computers should be shielded from the public," writes the anonymous writer (Katie, is that you?) on the CBS Evening News site. Now, the campaigns are required to trumpet their online presence. But a recent poll found that 72 percent of respondents still get their political news from the newspaper. "The other media, the traditional mass media, drives the message where the candidates want it to go, says Michael Cornfield. Implicitly, this means that the Internet helps the rest of us drive the conversation. Cornfield also says that the only candidate not using the web to its potential is Rudy Giuliani, who is nevertheless leading in some polls. "I think that tells us that the Internet, while it is a favorite of the activists, and while it is increasingly important, is still not thoroughly essential to becoming a victor in the polls," Cornfield says.
• According to an Associated Press article/press release, the recent Huffington Post/Slate/Yahoo "Mashup" debate attracted 1.1 million viewers, and the most popular participant was Bill Maher. According to the release, "Each mashup viewer watched 4.4 video streams for a total of seven minutes." What's ironic, of course, is that the release only gives stats about how the videos were passively watched, and nothing about the actual mashing up of videos by engaged participants.
• Another website attempting to bring all of the candidates' positions together in place for your viewing and electing pleasure has gone live. National Platforms collects information from the candidates to show their differing positions on major issues, but although a news headline touts that the site has gone live with "fully functionality," it's still missing the ability to compare the candidates side-by-side. In fact, most of the features touted on the site haven't rolled out yet, and links to their pages are dead anchor links...
• Last week we linked to a quote from consultant and Fred Thompson campaigner William Beutler, who said he doesn't think Chris Bowers' Googlebombing campaign is "search engine optimization" but instead a gaming of that system. "What they’re doing instead is optimizing the search engine for their pages, rather than their pages for the search engine," Beutler writes of Bowers and his cohort. No one really knows if all this playing around with Google is actually effective (though Bowers claims it is). But, Beutler concedes, "I submit that if you can get a negative link in the top three results for a politician’s name, then you have an effective Google bomb."

In Case You Missed It...

Following up on his previous challenge to candidates to honor One Web Day, Micah Sifry writes that John Edwards' was the only campaign to release a statement honoring the Earth Day for the web.

Although CRM software is hardly as sexy as Web 2.0 or nifty socnet strategies, David All thinks it's the reason why some of our favorite companies are able to make the world of the "Long Tail" niche available and profitable.

In our continuing quest to produce high quality, insightful, and entertaining video, we've produced the the third episode of techPresident TV, this one a little different than before.

Patrick Ruffini isn't convinced that all of the social networking and YouTubing is adding up to the kind of innovation we saw in 2004. Some in the comment thread think the lack of innovation is just fine -- it gives campaigns a chance to discover best practices and strategies. Others see innovation happening on the activist front, apart from the campaigns.