The Web on the Candidates

• The Editors Weblog reports that The New York Times and the New York Sun are both developing dedicated web sites to cover the 2008 election. "The migration of politics and political journalism to the web isn't quite new, but it sure is moving fast. We're moving too," NYT executive editor Bill Keller says.
• Valleywag took a tour through John Edwards' unofficial space in Second Life and wound up asking, "where are all the people, anyway?" Well, there two people there, and the writer was able to hop on to a helicopter and hover next them, prompting one person to say, "Dude, there's a helicopter behind you."
• Tom McCormick of The Bivings Report reviewed Barack Obama's web site. "As we enter the site, the Web 2.0 design elements are all there, but not too over the top or distracting. The gradients, the curves, the muted grays all exist here, but within a solid design, work well. The logo isn't reflected. Points there. The red and white flag stripes are in the header though, and that decision lost you some of those points." Overall, the site receives high marks. Also check out his reviews of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards' sites.
• Jeff Jarvis agrees with Patrick Ruffini's recent point that campaign's aren't conversations: "In the end, a campaign must be propagandistic: It must be the candidate getting his or her views spread, which includes making your allies spread them for you. The only thing two-way about the Dean campaign was the organizational end (’hey, kids, let’s invade Iowa’). The messaging was and inevitably is one-way, once the candidate has a stand — and once the campaign has begun, he or she better have a stand. I don’t use propaganstic [sic] pejoratively; it’s reality."

The Candidates on the Web

• No change for weeks: since we starting covering the presidential candidates' web sites, we've seen no change in Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo, or Rudy Giuliani's sites. Thompson has featured his three-Iraqi-state solution on the homepage for weeks, and while there are news feeds running down the bottom left column, and and links to press releases below the fold, these don't constitute major changes to the content of the site. Day after day we see the same image of Thompson and the same statement on Iraq. If you want to illustrate a campaign in motion (is it in motion?), keep your site moving!

  The same goes for Tancredo. His homepage features the same time-worn image of the candidate with a brief note from him asking you to join Team Tancredo. However, it does feature a recent video clips of Tancredo cutting up a Bank of America credit card in protest of its policy, he says, of allowing illegal immigrants to open bank accounts.

  And despite Rudy Giuliani's increased publicity this week, his web site has remained completely stagnant; the "Rudy News" news feeds are the only things that have changed on the page. I'm sure he'll introduce a more robust site in the future; but given his stature as a Republican frontrunner, he should have more going on than this.

Note: at 12:30 this Monday the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU will present a lecture and discussion entitled “What’s New and What’s News in the 2008 Campaign: The Dynamic Relationship Among Presidential Politics, News, and Public Opinion.” Go here for more details.