Serendipity35

It has been six months since I last wrote about the presidential candidates online.

Barack Obama has on 160,000 friends on Facebook, but Stephen Colbert reached the one milion mark in 8 days. Then again, Obama has ringtones you can download on his mobile page. That's presidential timbre.

The YouTube Campaign and the MySpace sites are still chugging along. At this point, if you don't have all three sites, you're not a real candidate.

MySpace is also where the first presidential primary will take place on Jan. 1 and 2, 2008. Try http://www.myspace.com/election2008

At this point, if you didn't know anything about a candidate and wanted to get his basic views & platform, I would go to those sites along with their "official" site. What newspaper or magazine would you turn to for the big picture?

Let's try one. At MySpace you can choose any candidate - I know very little about Dennis Kucinich, so I picked him.

A really interesting site that's putting a lot of this into numbers is techpresident.com If I was using this in class I might want to point out that according to Facebook friends, Obama is the leading candidate - then again, it shows that Ron Paul is currently in second. That's also true if you look at the hits on their official sites too. One thing you can say about Ron Paul is that he is using the Net well (his online donations have been talked about a lot in the news).

The Republican Texas congressman Ron Paul is one of the most blogged about people in the world. Still, he's a real long shot. Running hot here online but he barely even shows up in national polls. But he does embed his YouTube videos like a good blogger.

Things are the same locally, if New Jersey is an indicator. None of the following are candidates I can vote for so the links are just educational.

Phil Donohue (not the TV one) of "Donohue for Third District Assembly" has a MySpace site with U2's "Vertigo" embedded and it's way too loud. I clicked right off that one. On to Bill Baroni's professional-looking Flash site. Slick. There's a Somerset county freeholder candidate, Melonie Marano, who is an active blogger. We have Christopher Campos, (city council candidate in Hoboken) who has the YouTube videos working for him.

If you can conclude (teach?) anything from all this it's that pundits and analysts will be looking at the winners locally and especially at next November's winner and trying to determine which methods succeeded and failed. All elections from this point on are changed.