Brave New Films takes a big swing at Rudy Giuliani; reasons behind excluding Ron Paul from the GOP Bloggers poll; Mike Bloomberg creates a MySpace page and a Facebook profile but is definitely NOT running, really, he isn't; Ron Paul wins the text-messaging vote; and Barack Obama and Fred Thompson have the most-trafficked Democratic and Republican sites.

The Web on the Candidates

As we mentioned a few days ago, David Colarusso's Community Counts added a new feature that lets voters vote for their favorite video submissions for the upcoming CNN/YouTube Democratic debate. Now Michael Falcone at the New York Times' Caucus has picked up the story, using the feature to find his favorite submitted videos. "In bedrooms, dorm rooms, offices and backyards, the presidential candidates are getting a virtual grilling by a motley group who are among the first to submit video questions for consideration on the CNN-YouTube presidential debate next month," Falcone writes. Some of the videos are wacky, like "Bjorn," who wears a viking helmet and asks how the candidates will deal with immigration, and many like Al Cannistraro are on-point. "What moral and political principles, if any, would guide the development of your own administration’s national security strategy?" he asks. The best way to check watch these all at once is to visit Colarusso's site; he's even added a sidebar highlighting the least-voted-for videos to make sure everything gets seen.

Ben Smith at the Politico writes that Hillary Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, has been caught using polls to test out negative attacks on John Edwards and Barack Obama. While this is common practice among campaign pollsters, the world in which they operate has changed. Says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com, "what the Internet has changed is that 10 or 20 years ago, campaigns assumed that if they called a thousand people and shared with them a test of their most closely held strategic options that it was a secret. The Internet changes the ability of a campaign to keep this testing process secret. It makes it very easy for a handful of respondents to connect with reporters who connect with millions of voters."

The Web on the Candidates

The Media Bloggers Association has announced that PBS will be giving bloggers press credentials for next week's Democratic Presidential Forum hosted by Tavis Smiley at Howard University. Although the forum is not a debate, it will feature all eight Democratic candidates, who will answer questions from a panel of journalists. Viewers at home are being encouraged to participate in online forums but it's still unclear exactly how they'll be incorporated into the debate.

In his announcement of the new citizen journalism project OffTheBus, Jay Rosen wrote that "realistically," due to the Democratic backgrounds and physical location of Rosen, Arianna Huffington, Zack Exley, and Amanda Michel, "this is going to be seen as a project originating on the 'blue' side of red-blue politics." TechPresident blogger Patrick Ruffini, writing on his personal blog, finds the project similar to others that have a nonpartisan goal and asks, "are conservatives just perennially late to the party here? Or are the social circles in which the Rosens and Huffingtons run dictating personnel decisions about cool projects and thus perceptions of who is up and down online?" Rosen responded by saying that he never "imported or purported anything about 'bipartisanship'" but the goal is to make the platform open to all. It seems clear that the creators of the project need to reach out to Republican voters and influentials as much as possible in order to ensure balance with the project.

We're pleased to announce our newest feature: Technorati tracks, a series of dynamic charts that show how often bloggers are mentioning the presidential candidates over the last 30 and 90 days. The charts are broken down by party, and we've also included a third set showing how bloggers are also talking about prominent non-candidates like Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Wesley Clark and Michael Bloomberg.