Just over a year ago, I wrote about 76 presidential candidates and how they rank on the web. I gave each one’s campaign site my own “web score”, which was pretty much just their Alexa rank divided by their Google Page Rank. Since then, Alexa has changed their algorithm, but Obama remains the clear web leader. But what about the other candidates? What happened to the campaign sites of those who dropped out long ago? Let’s take a look.

Obviously, I’ll be skipping Obama and McCain, because they’re still in the running. If you want to read about them or their sites, there’s a million people talking about that elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to focus on some of the more notable ex-candidates: Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Joe Biden (yeah… he was running against Obama a year ago), Fred Thompson, and Dennis Kucinich. For each, I’ll show you what their site looks like now, and I’ll add my thoughts where appropriate.

Hillary Clinton

As you probably know by know, Hillary Clinton gave up on her fierce race against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination and is now supporting Obama in his campaign.

Ron Paul

Also still active and up-to-date is Ron Paul’s site.

John Edwards

With some pages missing completely (like Blog / News) and most everything else not updated since January, John’s site is a virtual ghost town where a presidential candidate used to live online. Today there’s just a Thank You message and memories of a failed campaign.

Mitt Romney

Like many, Romney converted his site into a political action committee (PAC) site, dedicated to continuing support for causes he believes in.

Rudy Giuliani

Here’s a guy who has a different way of doing things and continues to prove it. Although his site seems to have been updated to remove the rest of his campaign information, you can still contribute. Well, the form is there, but I’m not sending any money. Feel free to try it yourself and let me know.

Mike Huckabee

Mike transformed his site, like others, to a PAC, “HuckPAC”. While he talks about issues that he feels are important, he jams out on bass guitar and promotes his books.

Joe Biden

Remember when he was running AGAINST Obama? Now Joe is Barack’s running mate and very possibly our next Vice President. I guess if you can’t beat ‘em, run with ‘em.

Fred Thompson

Fred has been running around with John McCain, supporting his campaign, but his site is all about FredPAC.

Dennis Kucinich

Finally, my favorite transformation has been Dennis Kucinich’s site’s move from presidential campaign launch pad to whatever this is.

Oh yes… It happens all the time. You’re on your IM, MySpace, FaceBook, etc., when one of your friends sends you a message in a panic. The warning is of impending doom for your hard drive if you don’t act now.

If someone by the name of Ashley Marc James wants to add you to their list dont accept it. Its a virus. Tell everyone on your list because if somebody on your list adds them you will get it too. It is a hard drive killer and a very horrible virus. Please pass this on to everyone on your list. We need to find out who is using this account. Right click on the group name of your friends’ list and click: Send

That’s today’s message. Actually, that’s last December’s message, only it’s on FaceBook this time. It’s going pretty quickly, too. I checked my email to find two messages from friends on FB and by time I logged in to read them, a third had come through.

How does this happen?
This type of thing is only really a threat when people panic and forward it on. It begins as a message one person posts and a bunch of people believe. Each time it is forwarded, 10 or more people believe it and it spirals out of control. The people sending the warning blindly on to all of their unsuspecting friends become the virus, themselves. Maybe the Matrix was onto something.

What can you do?
Nothing. Well, nothing is a start. By not forwarding the warning, you’ve already decreased its impact on the internet. Go a step further. Reply and let them know it’s a hoax. Feel free to point to this article. I certainly wouldn’t mind all that buzz coming my way.

By the way, I wrote this to educate, not offend. If you’ve sent the warning to someone and feel offended, please don’t. Just consider it a reminder to not take everything on the web at face value.

Image via WikipediaWhile skimming through my friends’ tweets on Twitter last week, I noticed a mention of something called chi.mp. The first thing I noticed upon visiting the site is the need for a beta code to sign up. I hate having to wait after requesting a code, but I also know that it means they’re doing something right, and I have less fear of it being overloaded while I’m using it. I submitted my request for a beta code and forgot all about it, as I do often. Today, I got my beta code in the mail and jumped right in.

What is chi.mp?
chi.mp touts itself as “the dashboard for your digital life”. That’s great, but what does that really mean? Any service I sign up for online should do one of three things for me: promote my brand/name/site, make me money, or save me time. This one falls into the “save me time” category, but it also fits into a fourth category. It gives me more control over who sees what.

For example, Rob and Anthony are surfing buddies of mine and I want to share with them my activity on surfersgonewild.com. However, I only want to show them and not, say, my family or my boss. With chi.mp I can label Rob and Anthony with the tag ‘surfers’ and then label my activity from surfersgonewild.com with the same tag. When Rob or Anthony visit my domain they will be able to see all my surfing escapades, but no one else will. I get to share my surfing side with my buddies but keep my professional persona intact for work purposes.

The only downside is that I have to give out the domain, but I’ll talk about portability below.

Let’s talk about the control
Frankly, I don’t care as much about the OpenID end of things. It’s nice that it remembers all my passwords, but I’m more interested in the control of information. I have a tech blog, but I like to talk about marketing, too, and I have 2 companies and a radio station and friends and family. Many of these contacts fall into multiple groups. I live my life somewhat transparently, so I don’t feel much of a need to “hide” information from my contacts, although I like that I can share my phone number only with people I tag, say, “phone-allowed”. The control chi.mp promises for me is the ability to give contacts tags that I can then tie to permission to see certain things. I may only want to show my MySpace updates to people I tag “friend”, and my twitter to people I tag “twitter”, but I may want to tag a few friends as “friend” and also as “twitter” and “phone-allowed”, so they can see my tweets, my MySpace updates, and call me if they like.

Will I use it and how?
I have spent a lot of time and effort branding the domain JoeTech.com, so to imagine pointing everyone elsewhere to keep up on my online life seems a bit counter-productive to my branding efforts. However, I’m already thinking of ways I can integrate it with JoeTech.com in a way that maintains my brand. But it’s not all just about other people getting the full effect of my web presence all in one place. It also helps me keep it all together.

I really like Chi.mp. The support (so far) has been great, the site just seems to work, and it’s very smooth.

While trying to access Twitter, this is what millions saw today:

That, my friends, is htaccess authentication, and is often used to allow access to only a select few people to a directory or file, or in this case, a whole web site with millions of users.

What happened?
“Staging” is a development term, which refers to a final testing environment designed to be identical to the “Production” or live environment. After all changes to a site are made and tested, they are often re-tested in a staging environment and finally released into the wild. At a glance, it would appear that someone accidentally copied over the .htaccess file from staging (which protects the staging environment from prying eyes) to the production environment.

I emailed Twitter a few moments ago and will post any response here. Whatever happened, it seems to have wiped out Twitter for a few minutes, but it’s all back now.

On a side note, you can still see the message by trying to access the .htaccess file directly at http://twitter.com/.htaccess Don’t bother, though, because it’s just what’s shown above.

Update: From status.twitter.com

Users are running into a prompt for login on twitter.com. This is because of a misconfiguration error and we’re working to fix it right now

OK.. Maybe I said he could… Here’s what happened…

ShoeMoney challeneged John Chow to a contest to see who could get the most moneyfrom the Cashinator at the Market Leverage booth. The winner would get all the cash and the loser would have to throw in an additional $100 from his own pocket. In the eleventh hour, Tyler Cruz and Zac Johnson joined in and they decided that they would all jump in together and the losers would give the cash and $100 each from their own pocket to the winner to give away on his blog to a reader.

Tyler won and his prize was the unmanagable stack of cash seen above.

Yesterday, I stopped by the ML booth and was asked if I was going to jump in the Cashinator. Why not? After a short lunch, I haded back and found myself in the shower of money, trying to grab all I could. I came out with a small bundle of bills, and John was getting ready to go in, himself. He said he’d give his away on his site and I told him to throw mine in to the prize pool, too. He also decided to throw in the $28 he got from an earlier cash grab. Added to his $19 and my $20, the total is $67 and it’s easy for you to win.

How to win
Head to John’s blog post and leave a comment for an entry. If you want 5 entries, just blog about this contest and send a trackback and he’ll give you five entries. He said he will draw the winner this Saturday at Dot Com Pho.