There was an interesting article in CNet today about Microsoft's new "i'm" initiative, which has the

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.

Time magazine just launched a politics blog called Swampland and right now all hell is breaking loose in the comments threads, where Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney is being schooled by a legion of angry bloggers for his unwillingness to admit a mistake in a post. It didn't help Carney either that he chose to sneer at his critics by comparing them to Limbaugh-like "dittoheads." Some of the commenters are over-the-top mean, but if you want a rough education in the ethos of the political blogosphere, you could do worse than reading through the thread.

This afternoon some members of the PDF team set out to compare the websites for John Ewards, Dennis Kucinich, and Tom Vilsack -- the only formally announced candidates for president -- when we had a surprisingly hard time finding the Tom Vilsack for President website using Google, the world's leading search engine.

A quick Google search for the term "Tom Vilsack for President" turned up plenty of info on Vilsack, from bumper stickers and coffee mugs (the first hit!) to TomVilsack.com, the unofficial website for Vilsack for President, to a blog post titled, "Dumbass Democrat of the Day" from almost a year ago. But none of the results turned up Vilsack's actual campaign site, at www.tomvilsack08.com.

You might recall the great controversy in Connecticut from a few months ago, when Joe Lieberman's web site crashed the night before the Democratic primary (which he then lost). Lieberman's team was quick to accuse Ned Lamont, his challenger, of hacking Lieberman's site and email system. We wrote about it on August 8th, the day of the primary.

Today, Lamont and his supporters were cleared by the U.S. attorney's office of having anything to do with the incident.

Even though Lamont's team immediately denied any involvement and even offered to help fix the problem, Lieberman's staff was quick to accuse them of hacking the site. Some from the Lamont campaign speculated that Lieberman had failed to pay his bills. The Stamford Advocate reminds us of some of the rest of the ugliness:

If we are to believe John McCain and Alberto Gonzales, no child is safe from the online predation, and "we must do all we can to protect our children from these cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet."

Leaving aside for a moment images of Nosferatu prowling in the corners of MySpace looking for his next prey, there is certainly a problem with online pedophilia, but proposing broad regulation of the Internet is not the way to solve it.

Yet that's what McCain wants to do with his awfully-named "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act." The act would require that any commercial web site or personal blog turn over illegal images or photos posted by their users, or face fines of up to $300,000. Not only does this betray a complete misunderstanding of the architecture of the web, but while "illegal" apparently means child pornography, it could easily be applied to a whole lot else.

Back in June, Representative Jack Kingston (or someone on his staff) wrote a post on Kingston's official blog describing the "New Media Revolution" taking over Capitol Hill. As proof, they posted links to seven blogs written by Republican House members or their staff and listed the ways that Jack Kingston is a new media revolutionary himself: he has a flickr account, his own podcast (or JackCast), and a "hidden video page for insiders."

Leaving aside for a moment that a "hidden video page for insiders" isn't exactly embracing the open potential of social media, Kingston did seem to be making an honest attempt to figure how to use the Internet, and was excited to see some of his GOP colleagues doing the same.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how those blogs are getting along now, months after Kingston's post. Below follows a list of the blogs Kingston mentioned and their status as of today. Since it's understood that these blogs are usually written by staffers, I'm putting the name of the official for whom they write in parentheses following the name of each blog. Also, it should be noted that none of these blogs is a perfect example of how to be a "new media revolutionary"; Kingston himself wrote that "Most of the blogs below are still missing a few key elements of a blog, but they've still built the 'idea' of a blog in to their communication strategy." Let's see how well these ideas are executed.

Here’s an excellent and effective example of using MySpace and YouTube to tap into thriving online subcultures with the hopes of activating them toward a specific message. In this case, the subculture is the Harry Potter online community and the message is for WalMart to start treating its employees and surrounding communities with respect.

In the interest of full disclosure the comedy troop involved are really good friends of mine.

WalMart Watchdog, WalMart Watch hired the Late Night Players to make a video where Harry Potter must fight the Dark Wizard, Lord WaldeMart. With the help of many leaders in the Harry Potter community, the video has caught on like fire in just a few hours. It’s too early to tell what will happen, but in just a few hours it’s become one of the most popular videos on YouTube for the day. Related to this are the politically orientated Harry Potter Alliance and WhatWouldDumbledoredo.com. More updates on this story to follow, but if you’d like to check out the video, here it is (or click bellow):

For a harsh and hilarious review of HotSoup, the new political social networking site led by a raft of Beltway big-feet, read Blog P.I.'s take. Mike Turk says "it may be the most poorly conceived idea since Kevin Federline." Ouch!

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