Presidential Politics on the Web

When a news story broke a few days ago about Senator John McCain's technical adviser having said, "John McCain is aware of the Internet," I was reminded of McCain's own earlier admission that, "I'm an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get."

While it's debatable whether the leader of the free world might need to know how to use a computer in order to understand its impact on everything from global business to open government, the Internet is generally agreed upon to be a handy tool for spreading one's political message and raising campaign cash. And I've noticed, in recent months, that there seems to be a trend: Republican presidential candidates are getting less traffic to their official websites than Democratic candidates.



This is a graph of the Reach (unique visitors) to the websites of the four Republican candidates I heard the most about during primary season: Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Paul, and Senator John McCain. It's easy to see that McCain's traffic is better than that going to the other candidates' sites. Now, let's add one Democratic candidate to the graph, the presumptive nominee Senator Barack Obama.



The inclusion of the Democrat so radically alters the scale of the graph that all of the Republican candidates' sites are squished down to the bottom; you can hardly see their peaks and valleys anymore. That's the only thing I changed between the two graphs: it's still Reach, it's still the same level of smoothing and same time-frame.

So not only does McCain avoid computers, but his constituency does too? Is that true? I know plenty of Republicans who use the Web, so I'm not trying to make some red state/blue state generalization about Democrats being more technically inclined. Do McCain's likely voters already know what they need to know about him? Are Republicans likelier to get their information from other media? Has McCain sent more mailings? Will this trend hold through November? Please speculate (be civil or I'll delete them) in the comments.

Oil and Gas Prices Increase Traffic to Price Comparison Tools

I remember when, a few years ago, I first started to notice websites with aggregated, user-submitted gas price information, essentially gas price comparison tools.

While I don't drive, these things seemed like a lot of work to me. First, you'd have to have enough people in your area know about the sites. Then, you'd have to have enough people care enough about the sharing of information to post prices for the stations as they spotted them--and keep updating those prices. Finally, you'd have to have the time to identify the best price in your area and to drive there. I admittedly take the bus, but it still seems like a lot of work for slightly cheaper gas.

Fast-forward to now, when yesterday's price of oil per barrel saw a new high of $139.89. The graph above charts the traffic to the apparent leader in the field (from among those sites of which I'm aware) GasBuddy and its closest competitors GasPriceWatch and FuelMeUp. These sites are wildly more popular now than they were six months ago. GasBuddy alone has seen an increase in Reach of 250% when comparing the past three months' traffic to that of the previous three months.

It seems these comparison tools' time has come. With people lowering their other expenses to afford gas, reports of cars stranded on the side of the road in increasing numbers due to running on fumes, and the advent of the "Staycation", such sites are yet another possible aid. I remember when I first saw these years ago and forwarded them to my parents. I didn't hear any feedback and guessed they maybe didn't have the time to bother with finding gas they could buy and still afford food. I'm thinking I'll send them a link to this blog post.

Have you used these sites? Which is your favorite? Are there others we should check out? Let us know in the comments.