Now Playing on the Web: Election '08

Lately, there have been some pretty striking signs that the 2008 U.S. presidential election will play out in an unprecedented way on the web. This may be the first race for the nation's highest office in which TV ads are rendered ineffective, as more eyes turn to videos and other online campaign efforts.

Get ready for lots of humorous, nasty, and, if we're lucky, informative campaigning in cyberspace. If political blogs changed the way we discuss elections during previous campaigns, online videos and images will change the way we look at them.

The nasty has already begun. Democratic candidate John Edwards' virtual campaign headquarters on Second Life was vandalized this week by other Second Lifers who left behind posters of Lenin and Marx, a doctored photo of Edwards, among other things. From Edwards' blog:

Shortly before midnight (CST) on Monday, February 26, a group of republican Second Life users, some sporting "Bush '08" tags, vandalized the John Edwards Second Life HQ. They plastered the area with Marxist/Lenninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obsenity, and a photoshopped picture of John in blackface, all the while harassing visitors with right-wing nonsense and obsenity-laden abuse of Democrats in general and John in particular.

Candidates, welcome to Web 2.0.

Meanwhile, YouTube has launched You Choose '08, where you can find the official videos from the candidates' campaigns. You already can find lots of videos that have been edited by YouTube members, such as the very popular one of Hillary Clinton singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" off key, killing her chances to be the next American Idol. And this 10-second clip of John McCain looking as if he's dozing off during President Bush's State of the Union. Check out this Washington Post story for a look at other videos.

So while candidates can get their message out with no filter via the web, there's a tradeoff. More people will see their videos in their entirety, but anyone can tinker with those same videos and their virtual online worlds to get their message across, too.