It's been a while since I've checked in on our charts tracking how the campaigns are doing on the web, and even though we're now firmly headed into the August doldrums before the national conventions, some interesting trends are worth noting. In a word: Obama keeps adding friends, but McCain has been gaining traffic. And Bob Barr seems to have some real grass-roots support...

Because it's Friday, we bring you Bras for Hillary; Compete data shows a blowout for Barack Obama, but RealClearPolitics averages show a different story; are suffering from election fatigue?; GroundReport posts a transcript of last month's panel on the web and politics at NYU; Ron Paul supporters produce a pro-McCain site that could use a little subtlety; and Mike Huckabee will soon be launching a site about... taxes? We don't know.

Matt Bai identifies the core lesson of the Dean campaign, and says that almost no 2008 campaigns have actually learned it; ActBlue seeks to move beyond individual fundraising; William Beutler stays on the Republican ActBlue beat; the ONE campaign produces videos of the candidates' statements on poverty, but most Republicans aren't involved; OuijaVote 2008 is the first project to restore our "paranormal democracy"; new Compete data breaks down candidate site popularity by state; and our Hitwise charts show Mike Huckabee pulling even with Ron Paul in his share of web traffic.

Ron Paul and Mike Gravel are the dark horses of their respective parties. They raise a ruckus during debates and forums, they hold radical positions at odds with their parties' leadership, and they poll very low (Paul polls between one and three percent in all national polls; Gravel polls even lower). Not surprisingly, news coverage of them is scarce. So fired-up, web-savvy voters, tired of gatekeepers failing to mention more than half of debate participants in their post-mortems, are trying to influence media coverage and public opinion in the most straightforward way they know -- by writing and editing Wikipedia entries and Digging sympathetic news articles.