Just about every campaign now has a blog or a blog in development but who has time to goto every site every day and read the entries? No one, exactly and that’s where the Web site oh-ate comes in.

The site follows all the blogs of the ‘08 candidates and updates visitors on the latest posts. Best of all? The site has an RSS feed directing you to all the fresh content. Check it out!

Not much to do with the current crop of candidates but I thought it was interesting to mention. Via techPresident WhiteHouse.gov has received a new look. Personally I like the unique look of the old site. This new one looks more like a standard PHPNuke type portal site.

From techPresident:

It appears that all pro-McCain profiles at MySpace were deleted because of a miscommunication between McCain’s staff and the company. Here is the official announcement:

Over the last couple of weeks, the eCampaign at John McCain 2008 has been working to get a new website launched and begin engaging in the social networks. When I joined MySpace, I was proud to see the strong grassroots efforts people like you were making on behalf of Senator McCain and his campaign for President. I joined many of those groups with excitement.

In the last few days, we at the campaign began a discussion with MySpace about creating an official profile for Senator McCain. In the course of that conversation, a member of my team miscommunicated the campaign’s plans to MySpace, leading to the removal of all the pro-McCain grassroots pages created by supporters like you. Following the example of Senator McCain and in the interests of “straight talk,” I wanted to you to know exactly what transpired. When this miscommunication came to my attention, I immediately began working with MySpace to resurrect those sites, taking the issue to the highest levels of the company. Unfortunately, that effort was not successful. When content is deleted at MySpace it cannot be recreated.

I am extremely disappointed and sorry that this has happened. It is not only unfair to supporters like you who have worked so hard on Senator McCain’s behalf, it is a disservice to the campaign as we now have no forums in which to reach all those supporters you had worked to assemble.

I would like you to know that we will soon be launching an official John McCain profile at MySpace. I hope you will consider joining that group and trying to help recreate the strong presence of John McCain supporters in MySpace. I would also be glad to see you re-start your McCain group. If there is anything I can do to assist that effort, please let me know and I would be happy to personally help.

Please accept my sincere apologies once again. I wish there was something that could be done to change what has happened, but all I can ask is your help in moving forward and rebuilding. I hope we’ll be working closely together as the campaign progresses.

Sincerely,

Christian Ferry

National eCampaign Director

John McCain 2008

I am rather surprised it has taken McCain’s camp this long to put together a MySpace profile. There isn’t a lot of laborious work involved. From my repeated criticism of McCain’s Web site (despite the fact, mind you, that McCain advertises here constantly) you know I don’t have a lot of good things to say about McCain’s web effort. Still I am hoping they will turn things around.

Written in light of the Amanda Marcotte episode with the John Edwards campaign Lindsay Beyerstein tells her story at Salon and does a good job of summing up many of my own thoughts about blogging and elections.

This has been a VERY SLOW news week, especially campaign related news. Since so many Web sites are springing up around the 2008 election I thought I would use the lull to spotlight some of them.

techPresident is a site devoted to, you guessed it, technology and the presidential election. How campaigns are using tech and how tech is using the campaigns.

The site tracks the candidates myspace friends like the stock market, charts the mentions of each candidate on technorati, keeps an up to date blog of related news, articles etc., scours Flickr for new election related photos, watches YouTube and keeps you punched into campaign RSS feeds. It really is an informative and interesting resource that should be in your bookmarks. All that and they are just getting started.