A story from the Washington Post and seen when visiting the site:

The campaign took the site down over the week, said spokeswoman Maria Comella. The new site will launch Tuesday morning with some new features, campaign officials said.

It is not at all unusual for popular Web sites to go dark for a few hours for maintenance. But in a primary race that is being fought as much online as offline — where voters and potential donors are surfing the net 24/7 — it’s rather curious to shut down a site for more than a day.

Not to be a jerk about it but one could make the argument that there wasn’t much to take down in the first place. They could have easily just put up an index.html file that says “Rudy Giuliani, Please Give Money” and it would have amounted to Giuliani’s Web presence thus far.

I’ve had a hard time figuring out just what the people at JoinRudy08.com do all day long anyway. I run ElectionGeek on what amounts to $20 a year and I have more information about Rudy Giuliani stored up in this place then was ever gathered at JoinRudy08.com. Including a rather glib assessment of his handshaking. Beat that!

Giuliani has basically spent a ton of money thus far, if I am reading the expenditures right it was over a half million dollars in “Web SVC” this quarter for what amounted to a template with a couple pictures and paragraphs thrown in with an online money transaction system.

I could not even begin to tell you the kind of Web site I could bring you for half a million dollars a quarter. Certainly I could do better than loading up a pre-built CMS onto a server, opening a merchant account and taking labor day off.

As a follow-up to a previous post I wrote about logging into democratic candidate sites and logging into republican candidate sites Luigi Montanez from Leftmost Bitwrote me the following:

While I agree with you that all the candidate sites should have a login link
on the frontpage, it’s not as disastrous as it may seem. The reason they
haven’t really bothered is because the frontpage is never a driver to the
actions that require an account (event RSVPs, group joining, blog post
writing). The fact of the matter is that call to action emails are still the
main mode of getting activists to their site, and when they send those
emails they link to a specialized landing page that’s much more
user-friendly than stumbling onto the front page will ever be.

I don’t disagree that the most likely point of entry for those who actively use the accounts is through the action alert e-mails or through their community spaces. With that said I don’t think candidates should ignore the main page. Having a domain name that is easy to remember like barackobama or hillaryclinton.com is valuable because it is easy to remember. If I am on a friends computer or traveling or at the library etc. I should be able to sit down, type in the candidate name and not have to navigate around for what I need.

With that said Luigi highlighted a WONDERFUL point and I wanted to share.

This post also appears on the wonderful site techPresident, much thanks to Joshua Levy

Did you read the blog post on the candidate Web site where the blogger gushed over the candidate and outlined the talking points of the campaign? So did I, over and over and over again. I have to be honest, I follow a lot of blogs but I almost never read the blog sections of the candidate’s sites. I cannot imagine most of you do either.

At the very start of this campaign I really railed against the idea of hiring external bloggers. I get the idea. Speechwriters could write for the candidate blogs just as they write for the stump but I understand we are Web 2.0 and that wouldn’t be good enough. We want something personal! So instead of reading a speechwriter veiled as a candidate we are treated to the writing of interns, guest posters & full-time bloggers who try to tell us the candidates story through their story, which is immensely uninteresting and distancing and just sounds like rampant cheerleading.

When I look at the candidate’s blogs I don’t see speechwriting. Instead I see public relations. The average candidate blog post is the following:

I {saw, witnessed, was with} CANDIDATE in {Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina} and it was an {amazing, awe-inspiring, wonderful} time. My {pictures, videos, text messages} are here.

I was particularly struck when CANDIDATE discussed {health care, tort reform, flat tax, abortion, guns, labor unions, lobbying} and made an amazing point. There was a {man, woman} there with an amazingly personal story and I will always remember them. I am so grateful that I am part of this campaign and hope that when CANDIDATE wins and becomes President in 2009 they will follow-up on this issue.

The problem with these blogs isn’t entirely the fault of the bloggers but the premise, which is you take a bunch of people and have them write positively about a campaign. There is no excitement there, no room to grow, no running dialogue other than, candidate is good, candidate is good, candidate is good, vote.

Don’t get me wrong I want to see bloggers get work. I also would LOVE an inside track into the race. I would love to get a sense of what it sounds like and feels like on the ‘inside’. I would love reality TV in a blog, not canned thoughts and comment like we have now.

Frankly I also don’t care what a staffer for the Obama or Clinton campaign’s policy views are. I imagine they believe what the candidate believes, which is why they are with the campaign. I am not voting for the blogger. Same goes for the guest-posts of people talking about why they are voting for the candidate. It isn’t interesting.

There is only one blog I regularly look at, Fred Thompson’s. Now for all I know that is written by a team of speechwriters or bloggers. It says it comes from Fred Thompson’s own hands though, reads like it does and because of that he is 100% accountable for what is written on the page. If he writes a blog post entitled ‘Fifty-Two Reasons We Should Nuke the Moon & Hawaii’, he cannot just pass it off as misinterpreted or some other persons idea.

Blogging to me is an intensely personal thing. It is a writer using a medium to connect with people, to share thoughts, facts, opinions, and in some ways a stream of consciousness which points to music, art, literature, moving pictures and sounds that the author comes in contact with in their daily lives. Bloggers are reporters and are also personalities we connect with, grow with, get to know. Blogs are an awesome tool for a candidate to reach out to people but from what I have seen few if any are really utilizing them.

Yesterday I noted how logging into Democratic Web sites is a chore, today I follow-up with the Republican sites. If you want a summary, its just as bad.

WINNER for both parties is Fred Thompson who not only provides a link at the top to sign-up for an account BUT ALSO MAGICALLY SIGN-IN. Wow, what a concept and he isn’t even a candidate yet.

John McCain will let you sign-up but not sign in on the main page. To login with John McCain you have to go to “McCain Space” where you cannot login immediately you have to click another link to find the form.

Mitt Romney lets you sign up to join the team but it isn’t clear this leads to any more interaction that needs a login. I can post a comment to the Mitt Blog without logging into an account. Same with Sam Brownback. I can join “Team Brownback” but other than getting some e-mails there appears to be no account creation or login.

Rudy Giuliani, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul & Mike Huckabee don’t seem to have any kind of social networking/long-term account system in place to login to either making most of these Republican sites pretty basic. Go, look, contribute leave.

So four stars to Fred Thompson, zero stars for just about every other candidate Republican or Democrat.

Now as I said yesterday why is account creation important? I noted because it lets you track your visitors, give them access to information tailored to them and it helps the campaign keep in contact. What would it also do? Republicans, please note this, it makes it easier for people to contribute. Once a person is logged in they could contribute with pretty much two or three clicks and little typing making them more likely to do it several times and in the heat of the moment when they are all fired up from seeing you speak or reading something on your site.

Give them twenty steps instead of two or three and you might lose them. So my point is, start getting sign-ups and when you do actually give them the ability to sign-in.

I signed up for accounts with most of the campaign Web sites several months ago and honestly haven’t been back since. Then yesterday I thought about seeing what I could do with some of the accounts and so I began visiting the sites. I was struck by something, on most of the campaign sites I could ’sign-up’ for an account but not ’sign-in’ on the main page.

Usually when you go to a social networking or just regular old Web site with an account system you are greeted with a “welcome so and so” message which lets you know you are logged in. If you aren’t logged in you can either ’sign-up’ for a new account or ’sign-in’. Not so on most candidates sites where if you aren’t logged in it takes some time to figure out how to get there.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kirsten Anderson writes about wikipedia’s role in the 2008 election:

Every day on Wikipedia, the battle for the 2008 election is fought across the candidates’ pages through a steady flow of additions, deletions, edits, and reverts. A study of three days of changes on the candidates’ pages may not be a predictor of popularity or electability, but it certainly is fascinating in its own right.

In terms of activity, on August 17 the winner in sheer volume of changes in a single day was Mitt Romney, whose main biographical page logged a wearying twenty-eight edits. Internet darling Ron Paul came in second with eighteen changes, while others registered few or no edits.

Many of the changes on any given day in Wikipedia are fairly mundane: typo fixing, formatting adjustments, shifts of information from one section of a page to another. Others are repairs of vandalism, the wildly outrageous statements that are the equivalent of scrawls across a campaign poster and are usually quickly deleted. (It’s a safe bet that “Ron Paul is the new spokesman for Fierce Melon Gatorade” is going to be noticed and taken out pretty quickly.)

A story in the Times Caucus Blog about Nancy Robinson who is a gun-control advocate from Boston and came to the blogging convention YearlyKos seeking support for her issue and Andrew Rasiej who co-founded TechPresident. Robinson found little support from the blogosphere and Rasiej gave her (and the paper) an understanding of why and how to resolve it.

The basic idea? Bloggers are trying to unite the party, avoid the divisiveness over an issue like gun-control and many are gun-owners themselves. Rasiej’s suggestion, start blogging yourself and tie the site into a database of gun-deaths around the country to put a personal face to the issue. Read the article for a recap of the conversation and some thoughts about blogging and lobbying in general.

techPresident has created a wiki devoted to information about staff members of the ‘08 campaign. I for one love the idea and have already contributed to it. (I will contribute more throughout).

Go check it out and contribute!

Kathleen Parker writing in the IndyStar says no:

YouTube invites silliness, which is part of its appeal, but inviting so-called “ordinary Americans” to film themselves posing questions to presidential candidates does not advance democracy, no matter how much hoopla we manufacture.

What anybody can do, anybody can do. Anyone can make a goofy video and ask a goofy question, but the man or woman intending to lead the free world should resist dignifying the charade.

Joe Biden came close to showing his disdain for this insult to American intelligence, such as it is, when a Michigan fellow asked whether he and his Second Amendment buddies could be sure their “babies” would be safe. He then cradled his own baby, a military-grade automatic weapon.

Biden said he wasn’t sure the fellow was “mentally qualified to own that gun.”
Even if the candidates were irritated by this faux show of democratic connectivity, they had no choice but to participate. If you refuse to play with the YouTubies, you risk being viewed as elitist and out of touch with Tha Peepul.

I haven’t been a big supporter of the YouTube style debate and after seeing it I believe most of my concerns were justified and on target. At the end of the day I would much rather see them ask questions to the public on YouTube etc. for every debate and then toss a few in.

At the end of the day the debates themselves are flawed this early on (and later too) because the entire format is flawed. Too many people, too little time for answers, too long as a whole and little if anything in substance with the questions, the answers etc.

The user submitted questions with people dressing up in characters, singing songs, wasting time doesn’t help it only adds to those flaws.

Check it out at CBS.