David All's Slatecard pulls in its first modest haul, but no Republican site has managed to approximate ActBlue's success; Fred Thompson decentralizes his volunteer calling methods, released voter names into the wild; VA Senate opponents Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner post wildly different campaign videos; and House Republicans are Twittering, are "at the bar downtown talking 2 voterz";

The Web on the Candidates

Barack Obama's campaign has gone viral, writes Time's Karen Tumulty. "No campaign has been more aggressive in tapping into social networks and leveraging the financial power of hundreds of thousands of small donors," she says. While Obama has been the most successful at utilizing the web to generate micro-donations from 258,000 supporters in the first two quarters of the year, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are also trying their hand at smaller donations and larger communities. After Edwards advisor Joe Trippi made his amusing video of himself baking a pecan pie (Tumulty called it "embarrassingly awkward") with fellow advisor Jonathan Prince, $300,000 came into the campaign, with donations as small as $6.10.

Karen E. Crummy at the Denver Post has discovered two spoof websites that claim to support Sam Brownback. For example, at Baptists for Brownback 2008 you'll read that Brownback believes that the earth is flat, refers to rapes as "unplanned sexual events," and other untruths. Another site, Blogs 4 Brownback, traffics in the same kind of material. Both sites exhibit a kind of comic version of conservatism, making inaccurate, and, depending on your point of view, funny or offensive claims about Brownback's political and religious beliefs. While these sorts of sites present a message control problem for the candidates, Crummy writes that "the impact of parody or critical websites is unclear. In the case of the Brownback sites, some bloggers have bought into the rhetoric and dismissed Brownback and his campaign as 'wingnuts.'" But Richard Davis of Brigham Young University doesn't think they make much of a difference. "Sites like these don't sway undecided voters or push away (Brownback's) supporters. I think the biggest effect is that it's embarrassing for the candidate."

Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore formally announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination yesterday. If case you missed it (as I did until I came across Marshall Manson's post at On Tap), you're not alone. Here's why: