With only a few weeks, 2 to be precise, to go, the video wars are heating up.
See this one from Lessig

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

On 27 January I blogged about the difference in the online offerings of Barackobama.com and HillaryClinton.com
Today’s NYTimes.com has a great article on some of the design aspects of their sites, rather than just functionality.
The common thinking seems to be that Obama is the Mac and Clinton the PC, with reference to the now famous Mac vs PC TV ads.
Read the full article at NYTimes.com

By now we’ve been hearing a lot about the US Presidential election primaries, leading up to the nomination of one candidate per party ( Democrats and Republicans) for the elections itself.
It is obvious that both parties are really fighting the online battle as much as the TV, speech and road trip battles.
I thought it interesting to spend a few minutes on the sites of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to see what they offer a prospective voter and what differentiates the one from the other.
Both sites have an annoying splash page that requires you to sign-up to get access to the site. If you only press submit button, you can’t enter the site and then have to look for the skip signup button to continue.

Because they each have so much information about themselves, the states they are hoping to win, their issues, fundraising, etc, I decided to only focus on their media sections.
Obama’s media section has a TV page where all his videos are hosted. The TV “channels” include most recent, listed in states, issues and people section, your story (people’s own videos) Barack’s story, Michelle’s story (his wife), speeches, townhalls, podcasts and up close.
The close captioning section takes you to a page that has videos with close captioning.
There is also a Espanol section with videos containing Spanish subtitles.
The mobile section on Obama’s site offers great mobile features. Besides general text message updates, you can send a short code to only get updates for certain issues, such as health, education, etc.
It also offers 4 cellphone screen savers and 6 different ringtones!
Obama’s blog has links to Del.icio.us, Stumble, Digg, Newsvine and Facebook

Hillary has a section called the Hillary Hub. Here one finds links to any reference of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the news, whether it be a video from a TV station, a podcast from a radio station or a link to a news site. The page has a separate listing for references to her campaign on blogs. Each of the links have a send to a friend link.
She has a video section with a plain listing of all the various videos and a link to her blog.
The blog links to Digg, Technorati and del.icio.us

Next I’ll be seeing what is being said about them and what they are doing themselves, on Facebook.