The 51st State: The State of Online — The Presidential Campaign 2008 — Candidates and News Sources

No one could argue with Gary Price for crowning this article the Resource Shelf's Resource of the Week. It's from the November/December issue of Seacher magazine by Laura Gordon-Murnane: The 51st State: The State of Online — The Presidential Campaign 2008 — Candidates and News Sources (PDF; 524 KB).

In five extensive tables the author looks at the Web sites of each of the 17 presidential candidates, as well as mainstream media sites, blogs, and aggregator tools, and shows just how much the Internet is impacting the 2008 election. The article is beautifully laid out and Searcher offers a click-through page containing all the live links mentioned. The article thoroughly provides information about online fundraising, political blogs and discussion forums, how candidates are making of use of social networking tools, and how the mainstream media is using the Web to cover the 2008 election. One detailed chart compares the features of major candidates’ websites, and includes links to candidates’ pages on social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. Another chart provides comprehensive information about what you can find on the larger mainstream media election websites. There are also brief reviews of key political blogs and aggregator tools.