In the early race for 2008, most national polls have Hillary Clinton thumping Democratic rival Barack Obama by double digits. But the junior senator from Illinois can take comfort in at least one tally: MySpace, apparently, is Obama country. About 48,000 members of the wildly popular social-networking site have added Obama to their online profiles as a “friend,” while only 25,000 have “friended” Clinton. It may seem a trivial statistic. But to the political junkies who run techPresident.com, a new “group blog” that obsessively follows how the presidential campaign is playing on the Internet, no web trend is too small to track. Micah Sifry, the site’s cofounder and editor, says he’s trying to make sense of “how candidates are using the web and how the web is using them.” A lot has changed since the 2004 campaign, when Howard Dean helped pioneer a new kind of Net politicking, creating an online community of supporters that ultimately brought in $27 million and redefined campaign fund-raising. Now all candidates—drawn by the Web’s potential to help get their message out, yet leery of its ability to magnify the smallest mistake—are web savvy. (Or at least they hire people who are.) Sifry is trying to make sense of it: “We want to be an interpreter, to help people understand how the Internet is changing politics on a daily basis.” The trick is doing that without being accused of being a stooge for one side or the other. Sifry, a former political reporter for the left-wing Nation magazine, forbids techPresident bloggers from making “partisan” arguments. “If we have a bias, it’s toward making campaigns to make smarter use of the Web,” he says. In recent posts, the site critiqued a photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton in a fund-raising e-mail (too much Bill, not enough Hill); praised John Edwards for linking to 24 different social-networking sites on his homepage (“I like the spaghetti tactic—let’s throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.”); and chided the major Republican candidates for not having a single, candidate-created MySpace profile among them (“The No. 1 most popular watering hole,” wrote David All, a “modern media” consultant for Republican candidates. “I guess I just see things a little bit differently.”).
