It's been a busy week in the 2008 presidential campaign--Hillary Clinton launched her online "conversation" (see David Weinberger's spot-on critique) and went to Iowa; John Edwards also did an online video web-chat that he calls a "live online discussion"; Barack Obama laid low and let the explosive growth of one unofficial Facebook group (now at more than 158,000 members) speak for him; and Bill Richardson formally announced his campaign launch.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic candidate who showed the most growth in online grassroots support, as measured by trends in the number of friends they have on their MySpace page and in incoming blog posts to their campaign site was Richardson, whose MySpace numbers were up a whopping 61,100% and blog posts up 285.8%. Of course, those numbers have to be put into context. A week ago, Richardson had only one friend on MySpace; as of last night (Sunday, January 28), he had 611. His incoming blog link tally, as measured by Technorati, jumped from an anemic 92 to a still feeble 355. But, hey, you have to start somewhere.

Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) launches his presidential bid this morning and according to Beth Fouhy of the Associated Press, the longtime senator will announce his candidacy via online video to supporters.

While in Iowa this weekend, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) was caught on microphone singing the national anthem out of tune, reports the New York Times' Patrick Healy. The new media that sparked a "conversation" about her announcement message quickly turned on her as the video made it to YouTube within hours.

Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) launched his presidential campaign, via web video, in a hail of controversy regarding comments he made in reference to fellow Democrat, Senator Barack Obama (IL). Within hours, the audio of his remarks made it to YouTube, as did a clip of FOX News -- no stranger to an Obama controversy -- airing Biden's clarification. The senator later joked about it with The Daily Show host, Jon Stewart. (Video here.)

In South Carolina, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is determined to win as he picked up the support of forty State House members -- all caught on video -- via Laurin Manning of South Carolina '08.

TPMCafe's Election Central has video highlights from six possible Democratic presidential hopefuls from the Democratic National Committee's Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C. Among the official, exploring, or rumored candidates: Senators Christopher Dodd (CT), Hillary Clinton (NY), Barack Obama (IL), John Edwards (NC), Congressman Dennis Kucinich (OH) and retired General Wes Clark (AR). ABC's Political Punch has more, including a podcast from the DNC meeting.

Obama (D-IL) drew over "3,000 mostly sign-waving students" in Virginia, notes New York Times political blogger, Sarah Wheaton. The event was sponsored by the George Mason University chapter of Students for Barack Obama, a national, student-based grassroots organization. The group used Facebook, a social networking favorite among college students, to handle RSVPs for the February 2 appearance. More from the Associated Press here.

The Web on the Candidates

Danny Glover at AirCongress posted a 45-minute video (it's hosted on YouTube; since Google owns it, they made an exception for the 10-minute video length rule) of Hillary Clinton speaking to with Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Google headquarters last week. According to the Mercury News, Clinton first discussed policy issues with Google execs before speaking before a crowd of 200 Google employees. Although Bill Clinton enjoyed high popularity in Silicon Valley, Hillary still needs to work for their support. "She can draw on what Bill Clinton meant to the valley; it's definitely an asset. But I don't think it's immediately or fully transferable," says Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone. [via AirCongress]

Chris Cilliza of the Washington Post takes a look at the battle for netroots support among Democrats and sees that, unlike 2004 when the nascent movement supported Howard Dean, "the support of the netroots is less unified this time around." His three measures of support? The fundraising numbers on Act Blue (John Edwards leads the pack with over $900,000 raised), the DailyKos monthly poll (Edwards is first place with 26; Obama trails at 25 percent), and... techPresident, who provides the MySpace stats (Obama's on top).

The Web on the Candidates

Heather Greenfield of Technology Daily writes about the use of Google Adwords and Google-bombing in political campaigns. Despite search-engine operators' objections, bloggers from the left and right -- people like Chris Bowers of MyDD and John Hawkins of Right Wing News -- have used Google bombing to influence Google's search results.

TechPresident blogger David All has a poll up on his site asking readers, "Which website/service will have the most impact during the 2008 Presidential campaign?" So far, 18 out of 21 voters have chosen YouTube. Giuliani advisor Patrick Ruffini rightly suggests, however, that we don't yet know what the killer app in 2008 will be: "...the killer app of 2008 hasn’t been invented yet. It will be invented in a garage in August of this year, start gaining critical mass by the end of the fourth quarter, and be on the tip of everyone’s tongue by the middle of next year."

The Web on the Candidates

Just after techPresident's Jack McEnany posted a review of Mike Huckabee's exploratory site, the site went down (must be all that techPresident traffic!). Upon finding a Go Daddy parked url in the place of Huckabee's site, Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Report wrote, "This is the kind of message you get when (a) your site isn't done yet and you are parking a URL you bought on GoDaddy or (b) you go over your bandwidth limit for the month and haven't put in more cash." The site, up now, was down for at least an hour.

Over at PrezVid, Jeff Jarvis catches up with Iain Dale, creator of 18 Doughty Street, a conservative British Internet TV channel. Jarvis posted a video in which he and Dale chat about American presidential candidates' use of video ("He says Clinton’s Hillcasts are just pieces to camera; 'she’s not interacting with people, she’s talking at them.' He says that Obama’s site is fresh; I say he’s not saying [anything] but Dale argues 'you don’t have to say much; David Cameron didn’t say much' at the start of a campaign... He advises that candidates should not (like McCain) make their videos too slick. And if candidates have blogs, they should join in personally sometimes. 'You’ve got to personalize it.'"). Definitely a site to keep an eye on.

The Web on the Candidates

When the election is over, will the candidates keep Twittering? Marianne Richmond of Blog the Campaign in 08 wants to know. "So what happens when the election is over? "Do the candidates that get eliminated upon the way, close up social media shop?," she wonders, daydreaming about the first executive order: "Please cancel my MySpace account, Facebook, and Twitter accounts..."

Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Report takes on IPDI's choice of nominees for their annual Golden Dot award for online politician of the year. The nominees for the award are Ned Lamont, Mark Warner, Dick DeVos, and Jack Kingston. As Ziegler points out, only one of these nominees actually won an election. "Three of the four nominees did not achieve the office they sought and are being nominated for losing with style. Winning was not a consideration in putting together this list. I could understand including one or two politicians who lost (avoiding the word "losers" here), but three?" he writes. He agrees with techPresident's Mike Turk, who recently wondered "What is [the candidates'] strategy to win? What are their obstacles? How will their online campaign help seal the deal on Election Day? Most of the Presidential campaigns have not, at least to the casual observer, answered those questions. Looking at their sites, you have no idea how their web operation is going to move them toward the goal of actually getting votes."

The Web on the Candidates

Under pressure from the Moveon and netroots bloggers, including dailykos' Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and myDD's Matt Stoller, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled a planned Democratic debate from Fox News, Ryan Grim from the Politico reports. Grim writes that although Democratic leaders have publicly blamed comments from Fox President in which he jokingly confused Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden, Reid made the decision after a conference call with netroots bloggers, including Zúniga and Stoller.

Google bombing is so last year, says PromotionWorld. Google has updated its search engine to make it less open to Google bombing campaigns, such as the one that brought up the White House home page when searching for "miserable failure." Instead of Google bombing, the war for web optimization will be fought using search engine rankings, Google PageRank inbound links, MySpace, and Alexa rankings.

I'm here at the Politics Online conference in Washington, D.C., and I'm listening to Eliot Schrage, Google VP of Global Communications, talk about Google's approach to politics ("we want to make all of the world's information available to everyone. That's political -- knowledge is power") and it's plans for the 2008 election. After running through what YouTube/Google contributes to the political process -- using videos of Hillary Clinton singing out of tune, John Edwards playing with his hair, and a few jokey videos about children running for president -- he said that Google will be setting up a special team to help campaigns use Google products during the 2008 campaign.