Twitter claims its first victim; Obama dominates YouTube; small donors play a big part in the presidential, not so much in smaller races; Obama Girl does *not* win a YouTube video award; despite sharing dip and nachos with Bubba, Bill Richardson endorses Obama.

Journalists, bloggers, pollsters, and pundits flagellate themselves for being so wrong about New Hampshire; Glenn Greenwald calls the media "adolescent, coddled narcissists"; one blogger thinks Memeorandum is the best way to get election news; Why Tuesday continues to get the cold shoulder from Mitt Romney; Barack Obama is the most-mentioned candidate on Twitter; Obama and Clinton release post-New Hampshire fundraising numbers; and Bill Richardson drops out, yet there are still six GOP candidates!

The MySpace Primary launches, underwhelms; James Kotecki asks why Ron Paul's supporters are overwhelmingly male; a new bumper crop of bloggers rises in Iowa; a new pro-Huckabee group attacks Mitt Romney; the God-o-Meter charts the Godliest candidates; who are new video jabs from Huckabee and Romney aimed at?; and Huckabee pulls a mysterious (and expensive) ad campaign at the last minute.

A MySpace poll of their users claims that young people are perhaps more politically engaged than older generations; WaPo profiles John McCain, makes another tag cloud; the Slashdot community interviews Garrett Graff, chaos ensues; notes from the annals of e-democracy; results from the first National Presidential Caucus; the National Journal's Technology is closing up shop; a new Politico column from Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry looks at the Republicans and tech; and a new site from Bill Richardson might be the gloomiest thing ever.

The Politico launches a young voter-themed sub-site; Debate Porridge calls the campaigns on a Saturday and finds that most of them aren't working; interesting numbers about the effectiveness of campaigns' web effectiveness from the Politico's Ryan Grim and Compete.com; a puff piece about Joe Trippi tracks his rise to de facto campaign manager of the Edwards campaign; and Stephen Colbert passes Bill Richardson in a poll and more than 500,000 are members of a pro-Colbert Facebook group.

Barack Obama is the winner of the Huffington Post/Yahoo/Slate mashup debate; John Edwards will visit Columbus, KY, the winning town in his Eventful demands competition; Off The Bus introduces Roadkill, a guide to the goofy and wacky in the campaigns; Newt Gingrich posts on Mike Huckabee's blog, world explodes; Bill Richardson releases a new video featuring Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers, with a cool new site to boot; and Mike Huckabee hosts "Vertical Day," a 24-hour Q&A with supporters.

The Web on the Candidates

Patrick Ruffini looks at Fred Thompson's fundraising numbers for June, and finds that Thompson's raised 23% of his money (a little over $770,000) online. What Ruffini finds interesting is that, with no real direct mail base, there's no way a direct mail or telemarketing campaign would have come up with as much money. He concludes that, for Thompson, online fundraising may be the best way to raise money. "Though it’s critically important he get [direct mail and telemarketing] going, if they really work it, Fred’s could be the first major Republican campaign in which online receipts surpass direct mail and phones. That would be truly historic," he writes.

AirCongress' Danny Glover takes a look at PoliticsTV's video showing their ten favorite questions asked at last week's CNN/YouTube debate (PoliticsTV co-produces techPresident's budding video blog). After lamenting that "the most serious questions barely made it into the top 10 and that half of the questions involve attempts at humor," Glover (who also writes for the National Journal) takes off his journalist hat to say that the debate "was not a serious exercise in democracy; it was all a big joke perpetrated by CNN, YouTube and a small segment of the electorate on the rest of America. Let’s hope everyone does better the next time." Most have criticized the debate to some extent, but I do think the debate -- which proved that journalists don't have a monopoly on substantive questions -- was a step in the right direction. I guess Danny yearns for the good old days when televised debates were the pinnacles of democracy...

The Web on the Candidates

Michael Falcone at the Caucus rounds up the blogosphere's reaction to news that two of John McCain's top aides were quitting his campaign. Patrick Ruffini and Matt Lewis of Townhall.com share the opinion that McCain failed to put a top aide in charge. "The worst case scenario for any political campaign is for there to be confusion about who is in charge," said Lewis. "Ironically, campaigns are not democracies, they are dictatorships. Let this serve as a lesson that leadership by committee doesn't work in the political battlefield." Falcone also links to comments from Powerline's Paul Mirengott and MyDD's Jonathan Singer, which add to the general sense that McCain's campaign is close to finished.

The New Republic's Michelle Cottle responds to Hillary Clinton's HillCam emails with a much-needed dose of reality: "Come on, guys. I know you want to warm up your gal's image. And I'll admit that she looks cute as a button in that sunshine-yellow top, sucking down soda at the Grinnell Dairy Queen. But don't ask me to believe that these adorable mini movies are any less contrived than an old-fashioned TV ad. Just because you have jittery camera work and zero production values doesn't make your offering 'spontaneous.'" Cottle's assault on "phony Web authenticity" extends beyond Clinton to all of the other candidates and to proclamations about how the Internet is changing campaigning. "Indeed, thus far, what has struck me most about the Brave New World of virtual campaigning is how much it resembles the Tiresome Old World of actual campaigning. Now, instead of relying on scripted debate answers, impersonal rallies, and slick television ads to get to know our candidates, we can turn to scripted blog posts, impersonal e-mails, and slick webcasts." This is not to say that the Internet isn't changing campaigning; but, as Cottle points out, despite the new tools at their disposal, the candidates are still much more comfortable giving the appearance of authenticity than actually being authentic. [Unfortunately, TNR online is subscription-only, so you'll have to register to read the whole thing.]

The Web on the Candidates

Kate Phillips at the Caucus picks up on a "flooding the zone" meme that's made it's way from Chuck DeFeo to Joe Trippi to TechPresident contributor David All. Writes All, "the idea behind 'flooding the zone' is to virtually take organic search on YouTube out of the picture as effectively as possible. It’s practically a last-resort tactic which will hopefully never be needed. If the decision is made by your campaign that a YouTube video, like 'Macaca' is crippling the campaign, pull the trigger and 'flood the zone.'" Phillips points out that the previous day she posted about Trippi's reference to flooding the zone at the Business Development Institute's conference on "The Future of Political Communications" (and I heard him use the same phrase at the Politics Online conference earlier this year). Not everyone agrees with the the theory, however. Justin Hamilton, a staffer for Rep. George Miller, criticizes the approach in the comments below Phillips' post: "1) If it’s viral, it’s being passed peer to peer primarily. So the smaller number of people who take the time to find something by organic search on youtube won’t have an impact. 2) By going so far out of your way to keep people from seeing something, you’ve created a taboo effect that will both: make people want to see it more; and give the story a second day because the coverage will turn to the 'desperate cover up attempt' that might make more of an issue than the issue itself."

The Web on the Candidates

It will truly be the first YouTube election. A week after MySpace announced they're hosting presidential town halls across the country, YouTube has announced they'll be co-sponsoring, with CNN, the first of six Democratic debates and are in talks to co-sponsor a Republican debate. There aren't any details on the format yet, but this is certainly a good development in light of the work that Larry Lessig and others have done to ensure that TV footage from the debates is legally accessible online. We'll follow up as we learn more.

In their latest Politics 2.0 column in the Politico, some guys named Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry (they have something to do with a certain technology and politics conference and web site) write about the rise of the netizen, a new breed of citizen-activists who "are mastering the new platforms, tools, information systems and social networks available online and using them to push new ideas or galvanize new communities for change." Presidential campaigns can't dismiss the influence of these "super-empowered citizens," because "unlike volunteers of old, if you cross them, they can hurt you on a national scale. If you embrace them, they may be more valuable than any consultant you can find."