The Web on the Candidates

• Breaking: Young people get political news from their peers. As the New York Times’ Brian Stelter writes, the same distributed web that enables peer-to-peer music sharing has changed the way the yoof get their news. “According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks,” Stelter writes. And it’s not only the news — as the smart candidates know, this is how people organize themselves, and come to their political opinions.

• Have you been getting those Elton John emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign? Future Majority’s Mike Connery has, and he can’t understand why. “The Clinton campaign knows I’m a young supporter. I’m signed up on Hill Blazers. They have my cell phone number. There’s no way you could have filtered me out of this appeal? Really?” The icing is that this probably was directed towards young supporters — it was signed by Chelsea. Her peers probably have never even heard of "Don't Let the Sun Go Sown on Me."

• Despite his pledge to accept public financing, John McCain has actually gone $4 million over his self-imposed spending limit. The liberal blogosphere wants to hold him to task for it. They’ve filed a complaint with the FEC, and are asking people to sign the complaint for a second delivery. The current signatories include a who’s who of progressive bloggers, but we haven't found a comprehensive list; hopefully we’ll see that soon.

• In their bi-weekly Politico column, techPresident’s Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej announce the age of the sound-blast, in which some candidates (read: you-know-who) post 10 minute-long speeches and rely less on 30-second sound bites. We're not out of the sound-bite age just yet; just wait a few years.

The Candidates on the Web

• Not only did Barack Obama release his tax returns this week, but he made them publicly available online. While this is definitely a move toward transparency, Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland reports that some are saying it’s not enough; the watchdog group Judicial Watch says Obama failed to keep records of his time in the IL state legislature. Meanwhile, our own Andrew Rasiej gives him a pass: “It’s further indicative of the fact that he has made a public commitment to transparency, and that if he’s elected president, we would probably have the most transparent government in history,” he told Stirland.

• Obama isn’t the only candidate to have a hit on YouTube; Hillary’s also been making waves. Unfortunately, as Rachel Sklar writes at the Huffington Post, these are the negative kind of waves. The video of her trip to Bosnia — in which she’s not running from sniper fire — has been viewed more than 1.5 million times as of this morning, and was the most-viewed video of the day yesterday. For a video that was at 250,000 views at the beginning of the week, that's quite a jump. Maybe Hillary needs to release a big speech on race, or gender, or something, and get it online, pronto.

In Case You Missed It…

Thanks to a new nonpartisan service called VoterVoter, you can not only be an ad-maker who spreads your ideas on the net — you can get your ad on television, without having to learn how to navigate the complicated world of TV ad-buying, targeting and placement. Micah Sifry wonders if this could be the ActBlue of political advertising.

A quick housekeeping note: we’ve added a new YouTube chart to our YouTube stats page that shows all three candidates together, living as comforrtably as cats and dogs. As you might imagine, Obama has many, many more views than McCain or Clinton. And check out that post-race speech jump...