More on young voters in 2008; lost votes in California?; Ben Smith shares the labor and the smarts; Real Clear Politics earns some kudos; Matt Stoller reinvents campaign finance reform; Patrick Leahy wants the Founding Fathers online; what went wrong for Mitt Romney; McCain aide shares some secrets; GOP "money-bomb" bombs; Josh reports from Italy; our favorite videos; and some reality checks to end the week.

So, this afternoon I got an email reading, "Howard Dean sent you a message on Facebook." (This is after I decided to accept his friend invitation yesterday.) Well, it wasn't really from Dean. What I did get was an email from the person who is paid to "be" Howard Dean on Facebook, or rather, one of the staffers behind his profile, Stephanie Taylor, the managing editor of Democrats.org. I wish I could say I was disappointed to not hear directly from the Governor, but this is what I expected. Let's parse what she wrote...

Today, I got a friend request on Facebook from Howard Dean, and I decided to break my own rule on accepting such requests from politicians, because I wonder how he's going to use Facebook...and if he'll now respond to my email to him.

The Web on the Candidates

James Kotecki has a great video analysis of Rudy Giuliani's reluctance to take advantage of the social web (Jeff Jarvis isn't so diplomatic, and calls Rudy a "control freak"). James points out that, despite having virtually no presence on YouTube (except for that drag-queen video), Rudy still tops most polls. Does that prove that YouTube doesn't matter? Of course not. Candidates need to use video to show their real side and to insulate themselves from attacks. "The longer Mayor Giuliani stays atop the polls, the more likely it is that other videos, potentially much more damaging than his queen-for-a-day appearance, will show up as well... viewers will be more likely to forgive a candidate's YouTube transgressions if they've been using YouTube to show themselves as a real person," Kotecki says.

After reading about danah boyd's fantastic essay about class differences on Facebook and MySpace, Eyeon08 was struck by the idea that "those with more education tend to be on Facebook while those in the margins of nearly every aspect of our culture can be found on MySpace." He decided to compare Barack Obama's numbers on the two sites (using our charts, of course). He found that Obama is doing better than Hillary Clinton "among the educated rich kids," i.e., on Facebook. Does this mean anything? Who knows, though it should be noted that before Obama's campaign took over Joe Anthony's volunteer-created MySpace profile, Obama held a similar lead on MySpace.

[This morning, danah boyd gave a great presentation on how politicians are failing to understand the social dynamics of online social networks. She's posted the "rough unedited crib of the actual talk" on her website, and we're pleased that she's given us permission to post it here as well. The editors.]

Think about the publics that you know, the publics where politics occur. Gatherings like this... conference halls, shopping malls, political rallies, etc. How do politics take place in these spaces? Obviously, speeches are a part of it, but there's more that happens in these publics. At the very simplest level, there's a lot of shaking hands with everyday people. Ideally, there's a lot of listening to people's stories... Always, there's presence. Presence has been a critical component of political discourse because it allows people to connect to and relate with politicians. Through shared presence, politicians are made "real."