It's just 16 hours old, but today's Mitt Romney speech has already become the #1 most viewed UStream video, according to the site's recorded video list.

One previous Romney videostream, from the YouTube debate, is on the first page of results with another following on the second. A recent Obama foreign policy discussion broadcast on UStream received about 2,000 views on each of its clips, and also ranks high amongst the recorded shows.

Romney is the first Republican candidate to jump into the UStream waters. On the Democratic side, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Dodd, Kucinich and Gravel have all run live video through the site. Though a little later in the cycle, it's gratifying to see a Republican leapfrog the Democrats in effectiveness their first time out.

The takeaway: UStream is fertile ground for politics and growing everyday. (Disclosure: I'm a political advisor to the site.)

Today's speech was simulcast live by Townhall.com, Michelle Malkin, HotAir, and Captain's Quarters. As Michelle noted, there's no MSM commentary and no annoying newscrawl in a UStream video. I didn't watch the speech on CNN, but I'm told by those who did that the presentation was marred by a conspicuous "facts about Mormonism" graphic that ran next to Romney's remarks.

Michelle also notes that, "Unlike other Web 2.0 companies I’ve dealt with, Ustream is open and receptive to conservative users." The company was founded by two military veterans.

Tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. EST, Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech will be webcast live using UStream.TV , a YouTube-like site for live video. The speech will play live on MittRomney.com, Romney's profile page on UStream, and just like a YouTube video, it's a Flash widget that's embeddable directly on your blog. Bloggers wanting to create a sticky experience for their users can embed the player in a post starting at 10:30 a.m. and invite readers to give their play-by-play reactions in a comment thread.

Obligatory full disclosure: I am an advisor to UStream, and am really pumped by the possibilities of live, free online video for politics. Just like online video pre-YouTube, live web streaming was "broken" pre-2007. Doing live video on the Internet was out of reach for all but the most the elite clientele. It cost thousands of dollars to stream a single event, rent the sat truck, hire the crew, etc. Now, it can be as a simple as a Webcam + EVDO card -- or any combination of a streaming-enabled camera and Internet connection.

In another innovative use of the medium by a conservative, Michelle Malkin has already used the service to hold live, interactive conversations with HotAir readers. (Each UStream video features a chat room where users can pose questions and talk with each other.) Your speech, conference, seminar or other live event can now be sent out live over the Internet -- and you don't have to be a Presidential candidate either.

Kudos to Mitt Romney's team for being the first Republican campaign to jump in.

UPDATE: Just realized there are 12 questions on the front page of 10 Questions, so the cutoff for getting asked is 1,165 net positive votes before midnight. I'm at +826 right now. The heat is on. Vote below.

The 10Questions question period is rapidly drawing to a close. Here is my question for the Presidential candidates. It's a simple and direct one -- one that forces candidates to articulate whether they'll reduce the size of government, and if not why not. I need you at least 908 1,165 of you to vote for it on 10Questions.com before the deadline at midnight tonight.



Here's the situation. The top 10 questions right now are stacked with you-name-it left-wing cause -- net neutrality, terrorist surveillance, medical marijuana, and "is America unofficially a theocracy?" There's a real chance that the Democratic candidates who participate will not be asked a single tough question that forces them to articulate their beliefs or address an unfamiliar issue.

Early reaction to my question is 2-to-1 positive, but as of now, I need 908 1,165 new net positive votes to make the top 10 -- and likely more than that to overcome whatever negative votes that are likely to materialize in the next seven hours. I know that more than 908 1,165 people will be reading this post, so I know we can do this. It's an audacious goal -- no other question has surged this far this fast. But it's worth the 5 seconds of your time it takes to vote to make sure the candidates are forced to articulate their views on limited government.

And Democrats are not the only ones who need to answer this. In case you haven't noticed, Republicans haven't done a real good job of shrinking government when they've been in office. It's time to hold all the candidates accountable.

Please vote.

I was heads-down on a project yesterday afternoon, so I barely had time to notice that it was November 5th. When a reporter emailed for my thoughts on Ron Paul's fundraising day, I remembered and scurried over to RonPaulGraphs.com, and promptly jumped out of my chair thinking, "Holy s---. It worked."

It was easy to miss "This November 5th." I only found it through my deep dive into Ron Paul fundraising stats. It wasn't that well advertised, outside the Ron Paul forums and blogs. And yet it became the single biggest fundraiser in online political history.

Two points of significance:

1. This is the first successful application of a fundraising tactic that beats email or an online-exclusive announcement. November 5th wasn't a huge primary win or a big media hit. His supporters basically willed it into existence.

2. This shows what a healthy, functioning relationship between a campaign and its grassroots actually looks like.

Like most conservatives, I was pumped to hear about the Reagan21 coalition -- and then deflated once I saw their web site. All that's missing from this 1995 vintage are <blink> tags.

(A staff member for one of the group's more forward thinking members assures me they've heard us, and that changes are on the way.)

One of the things I try to impress upon people when I give talks on Web strategy is the idea of leading with the Web. The only way for someone outside Washington, D.C. to interact with the cause or group you're launching is through the Web. Your online presence should be the very first thing you think about when launching your group, not the last. Though I'm sure this was the work of a well-intentioned press staffer who had a dozen other things to do, this leaves exactly the wrong impression with grassroots activists across the country. Just by sticking on a "Join" form, placeholder sites can be an opportunity, not an afterthought.

The messaging on this is also dramatically off. Maybe this is the 29-year old South Park Conservative in me speaking, but for a group committed to ushering in a 21st century political movement, this seems old, strewn with overly formal, self-important language.  Setting the presentation aside, how does talking down to me with language understood only by other Members of Congress inspire me to join the cause? The beauty of the Contract with America is that it was written in language real Americans could understand.

Efforts like Senator Jim DeMint's 100,000 Strong for Earmark Reform provide a much better way to engage people in a cause. Each time you go to JimDeMint.com you see one thing: a big honking signup form with a personal invitation to join a movement. That's compelling. That builds lists. That raises money. That gets you real power.

Last week, tech bloggers compiled Google Reader subscriber data to build a compelling ranking of actual influence in the tech sphere.

I would like to do the same for political blogs, but I need your help.

I've started plugging in data in this Google spreadsheet, but the task before me is so massive that I can only hope to have a comprehensive data set by crowdsourcing it. Basically, for any given blog, I need you to look up two things: number of subscribers in Google Reader, and in Bloglines. You don't have to look up many blogs -- just the ones you read up and down the tail. I'm also interested in local bloggers and lefty bloggers.

Once we're done collecting the data (though will we ever be done... really?), we'll have a model of blogosphere influence that's arguably better than traffic numbers or inbound links, giving us a reliable measure of how many readers reward any given blogger with prize position in their feedreader.

To join in, please email me and give me your Google account email address. Or better yet, contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn so I'll know you're a trusted user.

The sheet has specific instructions on what to do.

In the end, I'm hoping to aggregate this data on hundreds (if not thousands?) of political blogs, and keep the data open for anyone to view or edit, including academics, PR professionals, and general students of the blogosphere.

Can you join in?

Republicans need to understand what's happening here:

This is the result of just three emails sent by the Obama campaign. It's more than Mike Huckabee raised last quarter. It's probably more than any Republican raised online last quarter with the exception of Ron Paul.

Think about that. One email. $650,000.

Imagine what their nominee will do to us with the entire weight of the online Democratic Party behind them. I'm thinking $1 to $2 million an email.

Each email is the equivalent two or three fundraising dinners. Each of which probably require hundreds of man hours to produce. That's only for of one email, not the three that have been sent this week. One email that probably took someone an hour or two write, that took a few hours to get approved, that took another hour or two to be formatted and sent. (And "stripped down" email is even more efficient.)

All because they were able to build up a huge list in the hundreds of thousands using proven list-building techniques that, to some degree, can be duplicated by anyone.

At the end of Q2, the campaign claimed 235,000 BarackObama.com members. Given his astronomic traffic the first half of the year, the fact that they incredibly claimed more donors than online supporters, and growth since then, I have to think the mail universe they're sending to is closer to 500,000.

So I'm going to guess their metrics for this campaign look like this:

500,000 emails sent175,000 opened the message40,000 clicked through20% conversion rate8,000 donors @ $80 per donation = $640,000

But as successful as Barack has been online, not all their campaigns have been this successful. Their end of quarter campaign, for instance.

Comparing this blog post with their fundraising graphic, Obama picked up 9,439 contributions in the last three days of the quarter, having sent an email each of those days. Assuming $80 a contribution (the going rate for Democratic online contributions, at least according to John Edwards's ActBlue page), that's just shy of $750,000. Or $250,000 an email.

How did they more than double their fundraising performance per email?

First, the message of this campaign is a lot stronger. It opened up on Tuesday with an email from BO himself called "Hillary's money." They're going negative on Hillary. That's attention grabbing.

Second, the goal is audacious but ultimately realistic. $2.1 million sounds like a lot. Unless you know you can count on at least $500,000 an email and show measurable progress towards the goal through a live counter. In 2004, Joe Trippi talked about the $100 Revolution -- 2 million people giving 100 bucks to match President Bush. That probably struck a lot of folks as pie-in-the-sky. $2.1 million is doable. Set big goals you can realistically achieve with a short but powerful burst of activity.

Third, the message of the end-of-quarter campaign was so weak by comparison. It was basically: we're 34/35ths of the way there -- help put us over the top. That's not inspiring. That tells people they're not needed because they're so close anyway, they're just a statistic and someone else will fill the gap. Even though 10,000 new donors is a lot. They would have been better off resetting the counter to zero.

How much does the stripped down format help? Probably only at the margins. It probably means your message gets read more, but arguably the point is not to get people to read. It's to get people to click. The first time they tried stripped-down email was in the end of quarter campaign and it probably didn't help much. Message matters more.

This is all part of a pattern of experimentation that is vital in every campaign. The Obama team probably saw they weren't getting the results they were used to getting in previous quarter-ending efforts, so they tried something different, using real dollars and starting the counter at zero.

Ron Paul's campaign in the second quarter was everything its supporters so fervently claimed: distributed and supporter-driven. They raised $2.4 million. In the third quarter, they used technique to boost that return dramatically, putting a live fundraising counter on their homepage. That raised $5.1 million. Technique and gathering momentum doubled the return. And now, in the ultimate test of whether radical transparency and audacious goals can transform fundraising, they're looking to leapfrog the frontrunners with a $12 million goal.

The lesson here is get in the game. Always try new stuff. Do bold audacious things to first build your list and then monetize it. Try everything at least once, but don't get distracted by the shiny new Web 2.0 toys. Socnets still can't raise what email can. And realize that the Web is more than just a medium for getting your message across. It's a medium for moving people and money.

Ron Paul's supporters have provided a measure of radical transparency into his fundraising that would make most political operatives suffer heart failure. Going well beyond the now-passe end-of-quarter fundraising "bat," the Paul campaign has set a public goal of $12 million raised for the quarter, posting their current total live on the homepage and including the names and hometowns of donors. If a donation comes in while you're on the site, you'll see it update live.

As if this weren't bold enough, RonPaulGraphs.com has taken it a step further. Using the live data feed that powers the graphic, the site publishes an impressive array of analytics including a minute-by-minute view of donations and projected totals for the month and quarter.

But that's not all.

MoveOn.org has backed down and will allow ads critical of it to run on its network. The credit for this victory goes to Maine web guru Lance Dutson who placed the ads and conservative Web 2.0 leader Bob Cox, both of whom forced the issue.

Google and MoveOn's positions were deeply ironic in light of their ardent support for an "open Internet" with net neutrality and looser copyright enforcement.

Dutson is fast becoming our MVP at the state and local level. Any Republican candidate wanting to know how to fight back against the MoveOn.org/Daily Kos onslaught in their state should call Lance.

On this one, I stand with Lance Dutson and the Collins campaign and not with MoveOn.org and Google who censored a legitimate political ad. I love Google as much as any technologist, but they're flat wrong here.

In case you missed the brouhaha (which exploded onto Drudge and elsewhere), Susan Collins Internet director Lance Dutson placed Google AdWords ads fighting back against MoveOn's extensive involvement in ME-SEN, raising upwards of six figures for Tom Allen.

William Beutler has some great comments responding to Google's lame explanation over in the comments at TechRepublican:

So what Google's saying is, MoveOn can place an ad criticizing Susan Collins, but Susan Collins can't place an ad criticizing MoveOn?

The new campaign finance laws largely amounted to incumbent-protection, with its temporary, pre-election advertising blackout. Google's TOS appears to be a permanent blackout on criticizing any proper nouns who've requested it. Both result in less speech.

What Dutson did is not Coke trying to compete with Pepsi. This is not a commercial brand wielding a rival's trademark to drain profits from the competition. It is someone on one side of the political divide making a point about someone about someone on the other side. Isn't that what political advertising should be about?

MoveOn is a political actor, which likes to fancy itself as the equivalent of a party or candidate committee. It runs ads that elicit strong pushback from official Republican committees and candidates. So, are now conceding that an organization like MoveOn is above criticism in the Web's #1 advertising medium because they happen to be an organization with a trademark, rather than just an elected official or a party?

And more disturbingly, do politicians just trademark their name to (among other things) protect themselves from criticism on Google's expanding ad network? If so, that's a pretty severe distortion of the open, participatory online culture that Google claims to be fighting for. Major organizations and political rock stars with trademarks would be automatically immune. Everyone else, not so much.

That's not as far off as you think. Hillary Clinton successfully sued for the rights to HillaryClinton.com citing the trademark rights to her name. Could she now wield that newfangled right to thwart paid online advertising against her?

Unlike the "miserable failure" Googlebomb, this strikes right at the heart of the company's judgment. This controversy didn't result from an algorithm, but from someone deep within the bowels of the company's selective enforcement of trademark. This is not the first time that conservatives have felt the sting of Google's censors first. Many conservative creative types have experienced just this sort of bias in other supposedly open Web services. In 2003, my anti-Che Guevara t-shirts were banned from Cafepress because (I was informed) a law firm called -- appropriately -- "Legend" informed the site they were very stringent about enforcing their rights to the iconic image.

Of course, this did not stop several other pro-Che Cafeshops from cashing in on the dead Commie's copyright. My repeated emails to the company pointing this out were not responded to.

I don't come down cleanly on either side of the current copyright wars. I think current IP law especially as it applies to software and music is a mess. I'm on Google's side in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, but I think net neutrality worries are just hype.

But it's abundantly clear to me that if we blindly accept Google's claims just so we can assert our tech bona fides, conservatives will get the shaft. Why? Because enforcement will be manual and selective at best, with MoveOn getting better treatment than Wal-Mart and Exxon-Mobil with their phalanx of corporate attorneys. And guess who that helps?

Google has had no problem raging against trademarks (can you say Google Book Search?) and for an open Internet without walls around content. Certainly it should have no problem extending the same freedom to political speech on its ad network.

This isn't the first time Lance Dutson has successfully fought back against the Left's invasion of his state. Go Lance!