Longtime PdF readers may remember that for a while we had a page on the site that showed which Members of Congress were most being talked about in the blogosphere, a ranking system that was built for us by Aaron Swartz, using incoming links to their official congressional web sites as one metric, and using blog posts referencing their names as a second metric. We called it "HotPols," but ultimately we took it down because we weren't happy with either metric: too many posts were being counted that referred to people with the same name as a Member (take Adam Smith as once obvious example) and not enough bloggers were bothering to link to the Members' web pages for that metric to show anything meaningful. Well, I'm pleased to say that now we've got a much better window into who in Congress is driving attention online, thanks to the great folks at OpenCongress.

Dave Winer has a provocative post up on the Quicktime videos made by Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui now in the possession of NBC. "Vlogging comes to mass murder," Dave writes.

Last summer MoveOn's Eli Pariser decided to have a little fun with web video, and with the help of Brave New Films got some folks together to post "Stop the Falsiness," in part to poke fun at themselves and to also take advantage of Pariser's being on the Colbert Report to advance their campaign against right-wing news programs. Their video went up on YouTube, and in the first week alone got more than 40,000 views.

Leaders of non-profit organizations all across the country may want to sit up and take notice. Ben Rattray has opened the public beta of his new site, Change.org. Here's what he says about it:

So now the rightwing Catholic League has waded into the presidential scrum with an attack on the John Edwards campaign for hiring two bloggers who have, in the past, written harsh, even profane, criticisms of the Church. Free speech is a bitch, isn't it?

Danny Glover of Technology Daily, who also writes the Beltway Blogroll for National Journal, has a post up claiming to have found the "First Blog Scandal of Campaign 2008," but in my humble opinion it's much ado about nothing.

Or rather, Rep. Stephen Urquhart's legislative wiki, Politicopia, is having a good showing in its first week. Urquhart emailed me to say, "The first week has been good. Citizens are participating and leaders are taking notice. Politicopia made both of the major newspapers, and the Governor, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House have all been on the site."

Indeed, the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Urquhart used the site to put up a preview version of an education voucher bill he is sponsoring, and Democrat Minority Whip Brad King responded positively, saying he "really kind of liked" the idea. "We'd much rather have it out there where we can all see it," he said.

Adam Conner, who wrote a screed against about protests against Facebook's then-new "News Feed" feature back in September, is back with more Facebook fun, this time taking a close look at the Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack," which has the goal of getting one million Facebook members to sign on in support of Barack Obama.

It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to pull together the data on how the Republican presidential candidates are doing in terms of bottom-up support for their campaigns online, for which I apologize. Here's the headline: They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders* are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A.

To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo out of that equation, the Republican total drops below 2,000.