But this one was @CQPolitics, representing Congressional Quarterly, the venerable political news organization recently acquired by The Economist Group. [Also: CQ is a competitor of my former employer (and in the interests of disclosure: client of my current employer) and has at various times employed various friends and associates of yours truly.] I followed back.

I noticed almost immediately that there was a wide gap between the number of Twitter accounts following @CQPolitics and the number of accounts CQ was following back. According to the e-mail notification, the account had 17,929 followers and was following only 84 people. I had become the 85th. This is highly unusual; the very few Twitter users with a ratio of followers-to-friends this lopsided are typically famous-offline celebrities who have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon: Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and Shaquille O’Neal (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) for example. Although these celebs have north of 1.5 million followers (Kutcher has twice that) even Shaq follows 555 people back.

I might have liked to believe, for a moment, that I should be flattered CQ had counted me among its Beltway media personalities worth following. But I didn’t buy that, either. I saved a screen cap of @CQPolitics’ friend grid, featured in everyone’s right hand column, and decided to revisit the matter in a few days. This is what it looked like last weekend:

A few days became last night, when I returned to the page and compared the grid to the one from a week ago, this is what it looked like:

Quite a bit different, no? I thought so, and decided to check it against TwitterCounter.com, which produces graphs of Twitter users’ recent follower/following history. First of all, I wondered, how many other users have been following @CQPolitics over time? The graph looks like this:

And then, over time, how how many other users had CQ’s Twitter account been following back? This is what I found:

Well, that’s something. What are we looking at? In the first chart, we can see CQ’s followers growing organically since April, only to drop off slightly in the past couple of weeks. But this drop-off is only the ripple from a much bigger change we see in the second chart: after following and unfollowing accounts as it climbed from 4,600 friends to 9,200 (more about this below), CQ decided to shed them all — in fits and starts and then, last weekend, it deserted the rest in one fell swoop: somebody spent an entire afternoon (at least) unfollowing some 9,100 Twitter accounts. Or they set up a bot to do it for them.

The resulting impression is that @CQPolitics has so much clout that it can attract a substantial following without having to reciprocate in kind. But as we can see, this impression is false. I assume they wanted their account to beat Beltway it-publication Politico, whose @Politico account has 16K+ followers but only follows two Politico-owned accounts. But as TwitterCounter shows, @Politico’s large and growing number of followers happened without them playing games with their Twitter followers. Now, that account is decidedly anti-social — but at least it’s honest. CQ took the shady route.

Even now, they are still playing games. As of this morning, @CQPolitics is following 126 accounts, relatively quite a few more than a week ago. But I am sure these accounts are expendable too, and part of the same ploy: follow a Twitter account in hopes they will return the favor, then once they do (or even if they don’t) unfollow that user in hopes they will not notice. The follow-unfollow routine is one of the spammiest practices a Twitter user can undertake; more sophisticated versions of this practice have gotten other accounts banned.

So, it turns out CQ is running a de facto spam Twitter account (even their tweets are piped in RSS content via Twitterfeed, which would be no problem under other circumstances). And I am all the more sure of this based on one very good piece of evidence: @CQPolitics is no longer following me.

Update: Well, now I think I know why they’re doing this — in fact, I was more right than I knew about trying to beat Politico. Fishbowl DC is comparing the Twitter followers of Beltway media institutions in a weekly post, every “Twitter Count Friday”. And it looks like nobody has wanted it more than CQ.

[Y]our overall thesis seems to be that liberals aren’t on Twitter, which is not the case.

That most certainly was not my point. Consider that I’ve written two separate posts about how Barack Obama was, until fairly recently, the most-followed Twitter personality. In fact, the first of those posts openly wondered why then-President-elect Obama’s team had stopped tweeting on election day.

To the contrary, I am quite certain that there are more people on Twitter who casually identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” but they key word here is: “casually.” The difference is that Twitter users who self-identify as being on the Right are making a concerted effort to use Twitter for political ends. People who identify with the Left seem to be using it more for fun. Or as Willis put it in the same comment:

Do conservatives have more of a hashtag culture on twitter? Yeah they do. La-de-freaking-da.

Notwithstanding the power of “la-de-freaking-da” as an argument, not all of Willis’ political allies concur. Although hashtag use on the Left trails its use on the Right, there have been efforts to recreate this culture, albeit without great success. Tweetleft is a website aggregating hashtags associated with progressive causes. But if we use Flaptor’s Twist to compare #tcot and #teaparty vs. #topprog and #rebelleft, this is what we see:

The red line is #tcot; the blue line is #teaparty. The other two hashtags, among Tweetleft’s most popular, don’t even make a dent. My new Twitter friend Angus Johnston argued to me that the #amazonfail hashtag — used to identify tweets relating to Amazon.com’s recent (apparently unintentional) blacklisting of LGBT titles from sales rankings — was a good example of this. If we compare #tcot vs. #amazonfail over the past 48 hours — red again is #tcot and blue is #amazonfail — it is clear he has a point:

This demonstrates to me that a “hashtag culture” on the Left could easily outpace what the Right has now, if so organized. But it should not be overestimated, either — #amazonfail went viral and therefore pulled in many more people who may not have thought it a Right vs. Left issue. An overtly partisan or ideological effort — which most certainly describes #tcot — remains to be seen.

NYU’s Jay Rosen offered a PBS MediaShift column by my colleague Simon Owens — who also pointed it out to me — about RNC protesters using Twitter to communicate (spontaneous and not sustained) as well as Twitter Vote Report (not clearly an ideological project).

Meanwhile there are other examples of Twitter being deployed by the Right, and interesting developments therefrom:

• As I first noted in December, political fundraising on Twitter was first a Republican innovation, as spearheaded by the campaign of California Senate candidate Chuck DeVore.
• Conservatives’ use of Twitter was encouraged by Hugh Hewitt on his radio show. His producer Duane Patterson is even the sixth-most followed person on TCOT. Hewitt was also an early advocate of blogging, so his involvement here is no great surprise — but it’s a lot better than Keith Olbermann is doing.
• Among those “top conservatives” are some familiar names and brands: Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and RightWingNews. But who are Bill Austin, Nansen Malin and Rob McNealy? Two are PR types (Twitter is lousy with us) but Malin is a member of the Washington State GOP Executive Board.

Like the blogosphere before it, Twitter is already bringing forth new voices and establishing new power brokers. At a time where the Right is casting about for new ideas and new blood, Twitter might have come along at just the right time. But the question remains: Will they extend their reach before the Left develops a stronger presence?

Zing.

So the Right had a vibrant ’sphere in the post-9/11 Warblogging Period, which drifted after the 2004 election, as frustrated soon-to-be-ex-Pajamas Media bloggers can tell you. The Left owned the YouTube era, which happened to coincide, not coincidentally, with President Bush’s second term. Their political blog infrastructure was developed largely on the participation of bloggers and blog readers, not anyone using Twitter yet, most of the time because Twitter did not exist or see any significant usage until SXSW 2007. (You know who I can’t find on Twitter? MoveOn.)

For at least a year now, the Right again has been leading the way on an Internet-based communication platform. So far it’s to organize for Conservatism somewhat broadly as a unifying cause. Top Conservatives on Twitter is not quite a MoveOn for the Right — a whispered-of but ultimately mythical animal not unlike the “Party-in-a-laptop” idea popular with some Neoliberals — but it could have more value as a list than Gingrich’s own Drill Here, Drill now efforts and even the (also short-time) #dontgo message it spawned last August.

These new conservative projects are often built around Twitter itself. Sometimes this results in really annoying tweets, but at this point the right is doing more interesting things in this space. Twitter is smaller than Facebook, but makes up for it in volume of press hits (hopefully someone with Nexis can back this up for me) and news reports that its traffic is about to go all hockey-stick. Maybe it will go Galt as well.

Conservatives also have other, much older infrastructure whose blogging component counts a few successes but still relies on decidedly Web 1.0 websites, and so hasn’t taken as big a hit in the Great Blog Crash of 2008-09. And like companies of the dot com crash (including Google itself), the concepts and websites that clawed their way out of the rubble did not and will not bring back substantial returns in the short run.

Twitter, by its sheer simplicity, is kind of a Long Tail product in that we can (and often seem to actually do) use it in spare moments between the day, which means its audience could approach that of e-mail (especially since, you know, you need an e-mail account to join Twitter). Either could build that kind of reach, depending on who experiments more through the rest of the arbitrary era proper.

Using #TCOT vs. No Hashtags Whatsoever:

According to Internet marketing blog Hubspot, the right’s #TCOT momentum means it vastly outnumbers the hashtags left-leaning Twitter users and bloggers… er, aren’t listed as using, not here at least. Hmm. So which hashtags do the left use?

Late intermission.

Turns out the left-verse doesn’t do hashtags at all, that I could see from checking these accounts on Sunday afternoon:

• markosmoulitsas
• jedlewison
• matthewstoller
• ttagaris
• janehamsher
• Atrios
• ezraklein
• glenngreenwald
• KagroX
• openleft
• mmfa
• owillis
• mattyglesias

My question for the Left is whether the port side of the Twitterverse will adopt the same habit of hashtags that moves stories — and if it does, whether it will even be led by the Kos-Greenwald-Marshall-Hamsher-Klein-Stoller-Yglesias Netroots movement. And my question for the Right is whether they know any of the Top 5 Conservatives on Twitter, because I haven’t got a clue.

Benchmark note: As of today, Markos Moulitsas (2,411) has 7,288 fewer followers than John Culberson (9,699).

Update: In the comments, @myrnatheminx — whom I tweeted alongside at TransparencyCamp during a @Leslieann44-led Sunday discussion — points out there is a website collecting progressive hashtags: Tweetleft. And as she observes, organized hashtag use lies beyond “‘the usual’ accounts.”

Why do I bring all this up? Because New Media Strategies (where I work and whence I type) has teamed up with Tropicana (the orange juice makers, not the casino resort) to create a Twitter-focused data visualization tool that we’re calling Fresh Squeezed Election Tweets, and just went live a few moments ago at www.anorangeamerica.com:

The site is continuously collecting tweets using the words “Obama” and “McCain”, counting up which other words appear with them — Vote, Election, Country — and other words that appear frequently — Bush, War, Lie (no one said Twitter was fair and balanced) — and representing this frequency by the size of the associated blue-red bubble. The bluer it is, the closer-aligned the keyword is with Obama; the more red, the more it’s McCain. And see the black lines connecting? Those show you which words are used together most: if you mouseover the keywords, you’ll get actual percentages. Did I mention it’s embeddable? I don’t think I did. Here, let me: It’s embeddable.

Is that cool, or what? Feel free to use it in your own posts and check back throughout the day, as the data set changes and perhaps reveals some insight into the day’s events. We might already have a pretty good idea who will be president-elect by day’s end, but Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets may help give a better idea why.

Luckily, this past week, he did. Whereas many Wikipedia editors announce that they will be on leave and then continue to edit, this guy took his vacation seriously. And from what I hear, the Europeans do take some long vacations.

So if you’ve never seen this tool, I thought I’d take this day of much discussion about Sarah Palin and Wikipedia to compare two snapshots of Henrik’s tool for the main Sarah Palin article. First, the chart for May. Each bar represents one day, and the number with each counts raw page views. So how many views is that?

35,563 total. Not bad — in fact, that’s more than twice number of page loads at Tim Pawlenty’s article that month. I am not, however, suggesting we start using this like a futures market; the tool is highly sensitive to news articles that will send droves to Google with a particular keyword in mind, and then many of them to Wikipedia. So how many visited Palin’s article in August?

Notice how you can’t see those bars almost at all until the spike at the end of the month? Some of those slivers toward the end are 14,000+ views. The biggest day was somewhere around 2.5 million, for a total of 4,220,407 views for the month. Barack Obama’s page received a relatively meager 1,377,462 page views for the entire month (if only this tool had existed when Obama announced in Feb. 2007) and John McCain’s page received an even smaller 988,944. And both presidential nominees received a significant boost that day and for a few thereafter. How about Joe Biden? Better than the top of each ticket, but still about half of his rival undercard. This proves nothing except that Sarah Palin’s entry into the race drew a tremendous amount of attention, but we already knew that.

Now that the tool is back, I will plan to make use of these charts every once in awhile. Close readers will wonder if this is the Wikipedia feature I hinted at a few months ago, and others may wonder if I’ve given up on writing All the Rage for this month. The answer to both is no, so hang tight. As to whether this blog is now simply about Wikipedia… the answer is I don’t think so.

Even at one day fewer (two if you don’t count #nn08’s low-key Sunday) the bipartisan-ish Personal Democracy Forum generated remarkably more Twitter noise than Netroots Nation, and apparently not much less in the rest of Internet news.

Netroots Nation had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivering a speech on the main stage, certain to be covered by political reporters on the beat, but PdF had Arianna Huffington, arguably more Internet-famous than anyone in congressional leadership. The partisan nature of Netroots Nation probably attracted many from the substantial New-Old-New Left netroots movement, more than Personal Democracy Forum’s awkward mix of Obama-emboldened NYC progressives and McCain-indifferent DC conservatives. This despite the minor Twitter scuffle over Huffington’s imperious remarks.

It’s worth noting that NN’s location — Austin, Texas — is the same as SXSW (#sxsw) and its Interactive Festival, the locus of Twitter’s first widespread adoption in March 2007. On the other hand, PdF took place in midtown Manhattan, which by virtue of population and proximity surely has more Twitterinos (also, Tweeps) close by enough to at least tweet about not making it up/down.

But I think the best explanation for PdF’s modest Twitter supremacy is that, like SXSW and unlike NN, the audience it attracts is younger and more reliably tech-oriented. After all, the surveys show that liberal blog readers are older and primarily motivated by politics than the average Valley startup founder. One was first about tech, the other politics.

Meanwhile, the ever more ubiquitous micro-blogging service’s strong showing at the political conference probably bodes well for its long-term mass acceptance.

Assuming Twitter isn’t down, of course.

Both conferences designated hashtags for attendees to use when tweeting their experiences and expoundances. For the Twitter illiterate, a hashtag is a short code word following a pound sign — #hashtag, for example — included in the 140-character message for the purposes of associating that particular tweet with a subject others are using the same hashtag to write about. For the conferences just concluded, the hashtags were #nn08 and #rton08.

Like we always do about this time, here’s a chart comparing their use over the past weekend. This time, we’re using Twist by Flaptor:

According to the historically-fortunate assigned colors, of course. Also, it’s worth knowing that Netroots Nation ran July 17 to 20, while Right Online was only July 18 to 19. Taking that into consideration, the difference in activity is not especially surprising, considering this was Netroots Nation’s fourth year while being the first Right Online to date.

But the trend lines are still interesting, and I think we can tease out a few observations:

• Friday late night through Saturday morning was the second-highest period of activity for #nn08 and the lowest for #rton08, at a total number of zero. Perchance the left went out partying while the right went to bed? This can’t be right. In fact, I know it’s not — for example, here’s E.M. Zanotti directing Friday night’s right-of-center bar traffic.
• A similar thing happens 24 hours later, on Sunday morning, giving the impression that the entire Twittering contingent of each conference slept in with a hangover. While I am sure this was true for many, it’s flatly impossible that nobody tweeted during the late evening and early morning hours. So, I’ve sent an e-mail to the folks at Flaptor, and if I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.
• Right Online activity is also likely underreported due to some confusion over which hashtag to use, although this probably doesn’t affect the overall trends greatly. Also worth mentioning, Twist doesn’t allow searching for symbols, so my real search terms were “nn08″ and “rton08″ — meaning even if some forgot the hash mark, as most assuredly happened, they’re included here.
• It’s also possibly notable that #nn08 activity fell off severely on the last day. Is this evidence that four days is just too long for any convention? Or is it lower because people were busy leaving? I’m guessing it’s some of both. [Update: From the comments, it turns out the fourth day agenda included few events, compared to dozens on other days.]
• Considering the reported attendance of each, the numbers don’t look so bad for #rton08. Local media reports put Netroots Nation at approximately 2,000, which apparently does not include reporters. Meanwhile, I’ve heard 500 showed up for Right Online, and based on the crowds I saw on Friday afternoon, this is plausible. However, with the exception of that curious Fri.-Sat. reporting period, #nn08 at most only quadrupled #rton08. At other times, it only doubled. Not quite a rallying cheer for Right Online, but that may be one to grow on.

See anything else worth mentioning? Feel free to add them in the comments.

P.S. FWIW, I believe I’m the first, as far as Google is aware, to use the word “expoundances.” Or should it be -ences? Again, your commentary is welcome.

So it wasn’t “buried” per se, in that the story has not (as of about 8:00 p.m. Thursday) been demoted from the front page, and almost surely will not be. Last I checked, it was #10 out of 10 in all categories. The article submitted was a user diary by someone calling themselves environmentalist (like e.e. cummings or k.d. lang), cross-posted from the long-running mid-tier leftroots blog Unbossed.

The first Digg commenter said:

It’s a scam engineered by big oil interests to dupe the $4 per gallon weary public. Drilling/plundering our coasts for about 19 billion barrels of oil is akin to placing a Band-Aid on the hemorrhaging wound that is our oil-dependent, wasteful lifestyle.

The comment received +31 “diggs”, that is to say a net total of 31 votes in agreement. So far so good. But out of the ~430 comments added to this story, the top-rated comments fell somewhere between ~+150 and ~+50 diggs. Here is the first sentence of each, in descending order.

+151 diggs:

I hate to play devil’s advocate but here I go. (personal note: I am not a Republican)

+107:

Buried for being misleading bullshit.

+68:

If we began drilling offshore, oil prices would actually fall, because speculators trading in oil futures would bet on prices to be lower in the future.

+66:

Both candidates are forwarding two different ideas, but they are by no means mutually exclusive.

+59:

I should have guessed this was daily Kos bullshit.

+51:

Thanks, DailyKos, for continuing to put forth the stupidest ideas on the internet.

Anyone who follows the two websites knows that Digg and Daily Kos are both very pro-Obama. But apparently they are not pro-Obama in quite the same way. Better yet, Ron Paul’s volunteer army of paranoids seems to wandered off somewhere else.

As for the title and the caveat above, well, that’s not the only way Digg can bury Daily Kos:

Online fundraising startups are a longstanding interest of Blog P.I. In our year and a half, we’ve devoted more than a few posts to the subject, including the progressive, Democrat-supporting ActBlue, the conservative, Republican-aligned newcomer ABC PAC/Rightroots, attendant security issues and flawed coverage often (but not exclusively) in the Washington Post. The last time I wrote about it, Rightroots had relaunched, and two similar Republican fundraising startups — Big Red Tent and Slatecard — were announced and on the way shortly.

Now, all three have been up for more than a month, which I think is enough time to make an early comparative assessment.

For those playing at home: Rightroots is a reboot of the ABC PAC/Rightroots slate that saw a trial run fairly late in the 2006 cycle, controlled by McCain adviser Becki Donatelli, former Giuliani Patrick Ruffini and Mike Turk, an outside adviser to the Thompson campaign. Big Red Tent is an outside-the-beltway venture by a pair of Austin, Texas web consultants Ryan Gravatt and Brad Jackson. Slatecard is the brainchild primarily of ubiquitous DC Internet guy David All and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram (who strangely has no website that I can find).

Last weekend, I signed up for each one and made some nominal contributions. Since then, I’ve continued poking and prodding. I thought about putting together an elaborate chart comparing their features side-by-side. Perhaps in a future post I will, but for now, but I don’t think that gives as clear a picture of what I thought about them. Instead, this post collects my observations, with screen captures. It’s a long one, so I’ve tucked the rest of this post below the fold. Follow me…

I should preface all of this with a caveat: These observations are simply what I found when I visited over the past week. It’s possible there are oversights in my summary, and if there are I will update this post. In true Mystery Shopper style, I didn’t discuss my testing process with any of those involved, so this should not be taken as a fully reported piece. There are probably good explanations for many of the problems I encountered, and if they are given, I will gladly link to them in an update.

Choosing a candidate to receive my small donations was not difficult: I am not only providing outside counsel to the Fred Thompson campaign through my employer, New Media Strategies, but I am also a FDT supporter. Thompson’s consistent federalist philosophy being a large component of my enthusiasm about his candidacy, where I could, I termed my group or slate “The Frederalist Society.”

With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on each in turn, followed by a conclusion. As always, YMMV.

RIGHTROOTS

Because Rightroots is the oldest, arguably best-known and first to go live (again) this summer, that’s where I started:

• The website is very simple, and not difficult to navigate. From the main page, one can click through to “Candidates & Races” or perform a search, enter the amount of money you want to donate and proceed to its Amazon.com-style checkout.
• Rightroots includes a link to the candidates’ homepage, which is nice, but that’s about it for any information about the candidates. One pretty much has to know who they are supporting before they get there.
• Using Rightroots, I donated $5 to Friends of Fred Thompson. This went fairly smoothly, up to the point where I had to enter a credit card. The confirmation number on the back of my card has just three digits, while the form demanded exactly four. So I put a zero in front of the digits, and that did the trick. It would have been nice if it would recognize the different security systems for each of the major cards.
• The front page of Rightroots also lists “hot slates” (groupings of candidates) but it doesn’t list figures for how much each have raised. These slates were evidently compiled by Rightroots itself, and so does not answer one of my main criticisms from last year — that it does not allow for users to compile and promote their own slates. I was told this feature would be included next time, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen. Consequently, this was also the one site where I was unable to set up my “Frederalist Society” slate.
• Now, the selections for some of these slates make good sense — “100% No Earmarks” is described on that page as:
  

  Honoring House Republicans with a perfect 100% voting record against pork barrel earmarks in the 110th Congress, as recently scored by the Club for Growth.

  Nice. On the other hand, one slate merely collects all of the Republican presidential contenders — well, except for Alan Keyes; I doubt that bothers you. But I also doubt very many people want to donate to all of the White House candidates.

• There is a “Donate All” button for each slate, but it’s hidden at the bottom, underneath the last candidate’s picture — it is not flush with the other, similarly-designed donation buttons.
• More nitpicks — Rightroots’ poll, promoted on the front page, is out of service. Try voting, and you get this:
  

  An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

  The good news is, the error message goes on to detail instructions for fixing the error. I don’t do code, but if I could get terminal access, even I could probably take care of that. Also, there is no button to view the results without voting.

• Along the same lines, I also got this certificate warning at one point:


• But I really dig the link to the FEC query for Rightroots’ own reports. The others should follow this example.
• I gotta give Rightroots this: It is back. The website languished after the November ‘06 midterms, which I complained about in January, drawing strong objections from some of those involved. I wasn’t sure that it would actually return, but it certainly has done that.
• Unfortunately, the follow-through seems to be half-hearted. Nothing has been added to the News section since August, and it’s been just over a month since anything was added to the blog (there are 5 posts total). It’s not clear to me why there are separate sections for “News” and “Blog.” This reminds me of typical campaign websites, which have had a press release section since the dawn of online politicking, then added blogs separately when they became the norm. Why not put everything in one place?
• RightRoots is simple, but it’s too simple. The site lacks any compelling reason to use it. (Really, not even a widget?) There is nothing that makes the site sticky, or compels you to come back.

BIG RED TENT

Next, the one I know the least about:

• My relative ignorance about Big Red Tent probably has something to do with the fact that its creators are based in Austin while the others are inside the Beltway. On the Internet, physical location is of much less of a consideration, but it still hasn’t received much coverage. It does have the official backing of RedState. But I haven’t seen them write about it since it first went up.
• This site is quite a bit different than the other two, starting with the sea of white compared to the others’ dark backgrounds. I like that. I like the logo, too — it’s the best of the three, I think. Moreover, it also has the best name, communicating its intent to build one large, happy GOP family.
• Otherwise the site is a chore to navigate. Why does Big Red Tent not have a “Sign up here” button on the front page? Why can’t I click on the logo to return to the homepage? Rightroots and Slatecard offer both.
• When you go to sign up and give money, the form asks for your blog URL (sure, why not) as well as my IM screen name (hmm) and cell phone number (really?). There are not required, but it would be nice to know why they were asking. This reminds me of the website Radiohead built to sell their latest album, “In Rainbows.” Am I opting into future text messages? I know people who just elected to grab it off BitTorrent instead. I don’t think that quite works for Big Red Tent.
• The reliance on Drupal means I was assigned a convoluted password, rather than being able to choose my own. Maybe I should write down every single password for every single site where I’ve created accounts, but I don’t. So this bugs me.
• Big Red Tent is not free of bugs, either: I kept getting this when I was logged in:
  

  “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.”

  Hitting “reload” did take care of the issue, but it happened a couple more times thereafter.

• Alone among the three, Big Red Tent has a Twitter account. Great! Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated in approaching two months:
  
  

  In that case, it’s fortunate that it isn’t featured on the main page (where it probably should be), where it would signal to all that there isn’t much activity here.

• Big Red Tent offers a widget that I didn’t test, but looks attractive enough to place in my sidebar. However, it seems to be fairly wide, and I doubt it would fit in everyone’s sidebar. (But I certainly approve of the fact that the example widget shows Thompson at the top.)
• Is Big Red Tent trying to do too much? Take for example BRT TV — a promised series of video interviews, hosted by Gravatt and Jackson’s Patriot Group colleague Jill Warren, that has no third video (really second, as the first is an introduction). Again, the lack of follow-through isn’t promising.
• More questions: Why does signup page still ask if I want to be notified when they launch? Seems to me like they’ve already launched. Why can I click into Groups at the top of the page, but not individual Slates? Isn’t “Group” just another word for category from the blog? Where is the blog? The Field Report is helpful, but I could use more of it. I also can’t find the Stump Speeches feature now, so I can’t link to it.
• Stump Speeches, Slates, Groups, Files, Contact lists, Guestbooks, Inboxes... help! I’m utterly lost. The confusing array of features reminds me of the late, unmourned HotSoup and its “issue loops.”
• At least you can create your own slate. As Gravatt explained to Matt Lewis in a Town Hall interview this summer:
  

  We were faced with a decision: Who will the PAC support? We only liked two options. Option 1 is for Brad and I to decide, and Option 2 is to let others decide. We decided Option 2 would be best for a PAC with an online community.

  That’s right on, although it doesn’t seem that there is much of a community so far. That said, at least it offers the possibility, which Rightroots does not.

• I concluded my experiment with Big Red Tent feeling both overwhelmed and underwhelmed. It’s great that there are several functions, but it seems there are several too many. Ultimately, I felt like maybe there was something going on that I just didn’t get.

SLATECARD

And the newest kid on the block:

• Slatecard had both the longest incubation period and was the last to launch. This owes something to principal David All’s penchant for self-promotion, which may bug others (including some at Rightroots) but probably serves Slatecard well.
• At Slatecard, the minimum donation is $10, unlike the others, where I was able to give just $5. Credit card processing fees do take a big bite out of proceeds, so I understand this, and there are probably very few who can afford to give no more than $9.99. On the upside, Slatecard alone lets you check a box to make your donation recurring monthly, if you’d like.
• On the downside, unlike the other websites, my phone number was required. I would kind of like to know why.
• Otherwise I had no problems signing up or making a donation. If there are bugs in the site, I didn’t encounter them. It was the smoothest experience I had at any of the three.
• On the other hand, why isn’t there a search function on the website? The other two do offer this capability.
• The front page of Slatecard shows you who’s “hot” — individual candidates and user-created slates — and includes dollar figures. That’s cool. The non-disclosure from the other sites I believe is a holdover from traditional campaigns, where if you’re not sucking up the dollars (and therefore sucking), you don’t want that public. All puts his cards on the table, and I respect that.
• Speaking of which, All has led an e-mail drive to raise $75,000 overall in the first month since going live. He didn’t quite make it, but it was very close — and within days, the $75,000 goal was met.
• Slatecard offers widgets, of course, and they are the best-designed of the bunch. In fact, if you’re on a Leopardized Mac, All has even explained how you can put one in your Dashboard. (Note: This is a Leopard feature; one could do this with Big Red Tent’s widget as well.)
• True to All’s love of all things social networking, candidate pages link to each candidate’s official pages on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like. Each is represented by the socnet’s logo, but you have to mouseover to know that they go anywhere. Slatecard links to candidate official sites as well, but it’s just a clip art image of a house — I got it the second time, but it would make a lot more sense if I could just see the URL as on Rightroots.
• Because Slatecard has the best pages for individual candidates, it paradoxically left me wanting even more. For one thing, the biographical summaries are clearly copied from older versions of each candidate’s Wikipedia page. I can tell because I know Wikipedia style, but it doesn’t identify the source.
• And these pages would be improved if you could add comments. Slatecard gives the impression of offering greater interactivity than the others, when in fact Big Red Tent so far allows for the most feedback.
• Perhaps the most unique aspect of the site is the ability to add “issue badges” to candidates you support. As much as I’d like to sneer, “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges,” I dig this:
  
  

  Naturally, I added the “Federalism” badge to Thompson’s page. It makes sense that you can only add a badge if you have donated to a particular candidate. However, I was only able to add one badge, and the site doesn’t say how many added the same badge as I did. It would also be nice if you could organize by badges and call up a list of all the candidates whom users think they describe. And would it be too difficult to let users create and upload their own?

• This feature also includes idiosyncracies that are all All — one of the issue badges is for “Supports Net Neutrality,” a pet issue of All’s, and something only Mike Huckabee does. As Ruffini has noted separately, it’s essentially a lefty issue. Sure, you can add the “Opposes Net Neutrality” badge… but why is “Support” represented by Pac Man and “Oppose” is represented by Blinky (the red ghost villain)? An annoying editorial tic.



• Perhaps a more serious issue — the badge for “Defeat Radical Islam” puts the Universal No symbol over the Star and Crescent. The war against radical Islam is not, the last time I checked, a war against all Muslims. But that’s what the badge implies.
• Most promisingly, the frequently updated blog announces milestones and upgrades, and has done so consistently since Slatecard launched.

All of these sites are good enough — that is, they do what they advertise. It’s just a baseline, though these websites are still in their infancies (maybe some are toddlers). After tinkering around with each, Slatecard emerges the winner in my book so far. It’s by no means perfect, but it seems more thought-out than its rivals. It offers some unique features that are still fairly intuitive, and it appears to be the most active. While there hasn’t been much activity on either Rightroots or Big Red Tent since their respective launches, I presume both parties imagined the sites would be self-perpetuating and requiring minimal upkeep. At least Rightroots doesn’t promise much more than it delivers; Big Red Tent was more ambitious but almost feels abandoned.

Most of my judgments above are fairly subjective, so I did try to include one objective (if imperfect) metric — how often each site is linked to by third-party websites. Since BlogPulse advertises this capability (unlike IceRocket) I fed the URLs for each into their Trend Tool, selected feedback for the last three months, controlled for possible alternatives (ABCPAC.com and BigRedTent.com both redirect to their respective main sites), and here’s what I found:

Rightroots has had the highest highs, Slatecard is buzzier now, but thanks to an apparent spike in attention last month, Rightroots is hanging in there. I presume that All’s frequent promotion for his project is propping up his numbers a bit. Big Red Tent was in the mix when it launched, but never received as much attention and has since dropped off significantly. (Note: I also fed the names of each site into BlogPulse; the Trend Tool returned more spikes for each, but the pattern was the same.)

Although there are many differences between the sites, they are not so far apart that, given an update or two, Rightroots or Big Red Tent couldn’t usurp Slatecard as the go-to site. But perhaps the most important thing about Slatecard is that, like ActBlue but unlike its Republican counterparts, it has already made the transition to being the primary fundraising mechanism of a political candidate. That’s VA-01 hopeful Kevin O’Neill. So far he’s raised nearly $65,000 — so All should definitely be thanking him for helping reach that $75,000 goal. Of course, candidate support is just what a site like this needs to gain credibility in Republican campaigns, and it’s no secret that brick-and-mortar GOP consultants are warier of using the web than their Democratic counterparts.

I salute each one of these websites, and their creators, for doing what they are doing. I hope they all continue to upgrade, borrow features from each other and compete for online GOP fundraising supremacy. And there’s no reason why there needs to be just one; perhaps they can all find a niche. I hope they do.

Disclosure: As previously noted, I’m with Fred, but that merely influenced the direction of my extraordinarily modest contributions. Otherwise, I do know some of those involved. I consider David All a friend, Patrick Ruffini a friendly acquaintance, and while I have not met Mike Turk in person, we do sometimes work together behind the scenes in the Thompson camp. None of them knew I was writing this post, and I doubt that any of them will be entirely happy with it.

Now on the same day that this story broke two other stories broke which contained absolute bombshells to both Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party in general. The first was the fact that George Soros’s defunked America Coming Together received the third largest fine in FEC history for voter fraud during the 2004 election. The other news of course – which hasn’t been told completely – is the growing campaign scandal involving several democratic candidate for president – including Hillary Clinton.

Both stories were just about knocked off the page by the Craig story and the obvious question was who behind the witholding of the story – again for two months – as almost to emerge the minute anti Hillary Clinton or anti democratic stories unfold.

First I’d like to point out, these stories (plus the not-so-distant Vitter revelations) mark another example of a cliché that isn’t necessarily wrong: Republicans can’t have sex, and Democrats can’t have money.

Second, he’s not wrong — the Hsu story might have been observed as a sign for Democrats that a Hillary Clinton administration could be scandal-ridden like her husband’s (well, not exactly like). And the left accuses Republicans of election-stealing enough that the Soros group’s financial misdeeds could have been pundicized, and bore greater scrutiny. Instead it seems to have only bored.

In fact, this this IceRocket trend chart showing comparative mentions almost makes the above observations sound understated:

Indeed the GOP gay no-sex scandal carried the week, and while that may be unfair, it certainly isn’t surprising. While there may well be solid examples of liberal-leaning reportorial and editorial decisions to be found throughout all this coverage, one also cannot deny the human drama of Craig’s unraveling career is more compelling than improprieties by non-electeds. In a tabloidy way, of course. After all, sensationalism is a troubling media bias, too.

P.S. Less than a year ago, this blog defended Sen. Craig against rumors very similar to his Minneapolis bust. Whoops! But based on the evidence at the time, no apology is necessary. A whisper campaign that turns out to be right is still a whisper campaign. A named source would have been a different story.

P.P.S. Mickey Kaus has a point about what Soros did and didn’t do. What he didn’t do was anything that conservatives and libertarians think should be illegal. What he did do was run afoul of existing FEC regulations. But conservatives have lost those battles, at least for now. What should be done is to change those laws, not excuse Soros for breaking them.

Breaking: AP says Craig is out. And you know what I mean.