Fred Thompson hit it out of the park tonight. Home. Run. Awesome speech, filled with great lines that just demolish the Democrats' attacks against McCain and Palin. If this had been the Fred that showed up on the campaign trail we might be at his nominating convention. Rudy's got big shoes to fill later on.

This announcement botch seems like something you'd more see in a West Wing episode. Young, energetic presumptive Democratic nominee is building up suspense to his VP pick, promises to be historic in announcing via text rather than MSM and the whole thing is fouled up by the darn media who's been around this block before.

Sidenote: It was broke by media but the first senses I got that it was Biden was from twitters by @newmediajim who's been staking out the Biden residence for a few days now and keeping us all updated. So maybe new media does get a mini win?

I have to believe the Obama camp did not plan on their pick being confirmed at 1 am with the text coming at 3 am. All on a Friday night/early Saturday morning. Friday night is usually when people dump the trash to the press (another great WW reference) not announce the second biggest news of their campaign. But the Obama folks should have realized that all this commotion around Biden and then secret service showing up was going to spark of sirens.

The whole text effort was a failure in that it came after the Politico alert and was at 3 am on a Friday night. I'd like to think I can stay out that late still, but last night was not one of them. :) The text I'm sure was a success in the sense it got people to sign up for Obama's list.

The RNC's going to have fun with Biden and it's going to be fun to see Rudy go after him in Denver. I also wonder if McCain does end up picking Romney, does that mean the conventional wisdom of picking a VP to help you pick up electoral votes is out the window? Though I suppose Cheney didn't exactly do much for Bush being from Wyoming.

This is a cool idea from the McCain campaign. Put together a video about the media's love affair with Obama. Put two different soundtracks to it and let the people vote. It's pretty darn good. I voted for option one, but both are below. To vote go here: http://www.johnmccain.com/video/love.htm

Version 1

Version 2

Check out the news story about my announcement here:

Haha just kidding. Though I do like my slogan. I think it'd catch on. This is from a company called PalTalk and my friend David Almacy sent me this. Click here if you want to make your own.

If you're a junkie of politics and the Internet then make sure not to miss this new study from Pew today about the 2008 Election and the Internet.
Some key findings from Pew:

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.

35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race.

10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.

6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% who did that during the entire 2004 campaign.

Jon Henke writes on The Next Right about Obama's integrated new media marketing campaign and how a member of Obama's staff will call up an online donor right after they've donated to ask why. Then they'll blog about it, etc.

It's a great exercise to do and one we did somewhat on Giuliani. Doing mini survey's of your online audience doesn't need to be that hard either. One thing we did was put a form on our donation thank you page asking folks why they donated. A lot of folks responded and gave us some good insight into what made them hit that donate button. The same could be done on an email sign up thank you page or even an online survey using poll daddy. It's something campaigns should be doing more of. It's easy and cheap to do and can give you anecdotal information basic analytics can't.

Thanks to Jeff again for sending on another interesting story. This time from the Atlantic Monthly on Obama's unprecedented and impressive fund raising apparatus and how he might be this year's hottest start up in Silicon Valley.

David All writes in TechPresident and TechRepublican of another key part of Obama's now famous bitter speech. It's that of Obama praising the open source aspect of his campaign and how it's worked very well for him. I'm obviously on the other side of the aisle from Obama but I've admired his work done on the Internet from the beginning. From the beautiful graphics to the willingness to trust people and be open on the web ... it's been groundbreaking. Like David says, it's too bad Republicans haven't caught on yet, but I know a lot of us are working to try to change that.

You know the GOP is in really in serious trouble when this is the sort of things it's candidates for Congress are doing. I mean really? This guy really thought this was a good idea?

So, Hotline's Last Call (one of the highlights of my day) has this quote from Howard Dean today about McCain and that ad being run by the NCGOP: "If he can't pick up the phone and make members of his own party stop airing a television ad he claims to oppose, how can he lead our country?"

That's a pretty hypocritical thing for Dean to say considering he can't pick up the phone and get the members of his party to agree on a nominee or heck if voters from Michigan and Florida should be counted. So, some would argue if he can't straighten out his own party has no right to start throwing rocks at McCain.