Clinton made the remarks at a graduation ceremony at Barnard College, a women’s university in New York City.

"We have two young women journalists right now imprisoned in North Korea and you can get busy on the Internet and let the North Koreans know that we find that absolutely unacceptable," Clinton told the graduation ceremony.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Clinton was speaking about using social media tools to raise awareness and fight injustices.

North Korea announced last week that it had set a June 4 trial for the two journalists, Euna Lee, a Korean-American, and Laura Ling, a Chinese American, but did not offer information about the charges against them.

In her address Clinton cited other examples of college students using social media as a political tool.

"You can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking or child marriage, like the two recent college graduates in Colombia – the country – who organized 14 million people into the largest anti-terrorism demonstration in history, doing as much damage to the FARC terrorist network in a few weeks than had been done in years of military action."

"And you can organize through Twitter, like the undergraduates at Northwestern who launched a global fast to bring attention to Iran’s imprisonment of an American journalist."

"These new tools are available for everyone. They are democratizing diplomacy."

Conveniently the same top 3 candidates in both parties are both considered the top 3 candidates, so I’m going to stick with the same in my new analysis (Democrats: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards.

Republicans: Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain). In my previous post I looked at a few points that haven’t changed, like age of domain and the choice of domain URL, so refer to that post for that analysis.

This analysis looks at basic SEO metrics and compares data from January 2008 to March 2007. A few new measurements are given following these, including PPC branding and a new metric called IndexRank. And for fun we’ll come up with the winners from both parties in terms of their effectiveness in SEO.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or inbound links, are how many sites link to your site.

These figures are from Yahoo.

Barack Obama leads in backlinks by about 150,000 backlinks. John Edwards started with having almost 6 times less than Hillary and beats her by 80,000 backlinks.

In the Republican field, John McCain started off with very few (comparatively) backlinks and still ends with 100,000 less than Mitt Romney. Romney leads Rudy by about 50,000 links.

Technorati Links

This is used as a measure of popularity in the blogosphere world. The more the better.

Obama again leads on Technorati links and John Edwards and Clinton keep their same position, with Hillary having the most percentage increase.
Mitt Romney started well ahead of both Rudy and John (2.5 X more and 5 X more respectively) and still leads in Technorati links. Rudy surpasses John McCain with a larger increase in links.

Alexa Rank

I know Alexa isn’t perfect, but it’s an interesting comparison. The lower the number, “the better”. The number represents the rank of the website out of the top websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. The most visited site on the Internet is ranked 1. A zero (0) means either an error or not enough traffic to rank.

All of the Democratic candidates have seen a drop in their Alexa Rank since March 2007, with John Edwards taking the worst drop. Barack Obama leads with the best rank.

All of the Republican candidates see a better Alexa ranking, although anything was better than Rudy’s rank in March 2007. Mitt Romney leads with the best rank.

Page Strength

All candidates made significant strides, as would be expected. PageStrength is not a measurement of how good the pages are, but of how well-known, cited, visited, and linked to a site is.

John Edwards has the highest PageStrength while Barack jumped the most, moving from third to second.
John McCain made the most stride but also started as the lowest in PageStrength. Both McCain and Romney end up with the same PageStrength, both beating out Hillary’s PageStrength.

Indexed Pages

Google and Yahoo both give a different number of pages in their index, so I’ll show both, Google/Yahoo.

These numbers are all over the place, it’s hard to say who reports more accurately (Google vs. Yahoo). However, there’s no doubt that Obama has created tons of content (probably a lot of user-generated content).

PPC Branding

I’m not going to recap the PPC from March 2007 because the keywords I looked at were only used by 2 of the candidates. This time I chose to look at the use of PPC for their own name, which I feel is a reflection of their PPC campaign. If you’re not running ads for your brand (your name) you’re probably not running much of a PPC campaign.

Barack Obama – Ads by Obama and Rudy
Hillary Clinton – Ad by Rudy
John Edwards – Ad by Rudy
Rudy Giuliani – Ad by Rudy
Mitt Romney – Ads by Rudy and Mike Huckabee
John McCain – Ads by McCain and Rudy

Rudy clearly comes out a winner, but keep in mind this is only a snapshot. If you follow these links at different times of day and different geographical locations you may see very different results. These are coming from the West Coast.

IndexRank – a measurement of content freshness

This metric is from 0-10 where 10 is the highest. The higher the number the better the content growth, freshness, and the more indexed the site is by Google.

Hillary Clinton – 8
Barack Obama – 8
John Edwards – 5
Mitt Romney – 9
John McCain – 8
Rudy Giuliani – 6

Mitt Romney wins out with a 9 above even the Democrats. Hillary and Obama are both at 8 and John Edwards lags way behind the whole group with a 5. Rudy lags behind the Republican candidates with a 6.

The Winners

Back in March 2007 there was no clear SEO winner in either party. After 10 months of campaigning, you can really see a lot of changes in all the candidates, some more than others.

In the Democratic party, Barack Obama clearly trumps both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the growth of their site and the pursuit in SEO.

In the Republican party, its not as clear but Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani both have made great strides, but I think Mitt Romney’s advantage in traffic, IndexRank, and Technorati links gives him an edge over Giuliani.

Comments

"I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality. Because once providers start to privilege some applications or web sites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose. The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history. We have to keep it that way."

In fact, Obama is making technology a central part of his plans for Executive office, revealing yesterday his plan to use Internet technology to open up government and make it more transparent.

Probably won’t happen – that open government thing – but it’s a nice thought. Nevertheless, he’s made a clear promise to uphold Net Neutrality.

Which is more than we can say for Clinton. Though she’s supported Net Neutrality legislation in the past, she has yet to mention it on the campaign trail, even within her Internet agenda released last month.

And that has organizations like MoveOn.org and other traditionally Democrat supporters nervous. MoveOn sent out word today for members to contact the Clinton campaign for fear she is backing away from her previous stance.

You know, because she’s never been known to waffle before, right?

Oh, wait.

De Vellis’ identity became a point of fixed fascination for political bloggers of all stripes. The political machine for Illinois Senator Barack Obama denied involvement, suggestions of which were spurred on by the mention of his campaign at the end of the Hilary 1984 video.

The mainstream media became interested; the video has been mentioned in questions posed to both campaigns. Finally, Arianna Huffington claimed she had the mystery cracked:

Well, today I can end the guessing. Last night, we sent out a challenge to the HuffPost team asking them to hit the phones and contact all their sources. As a result, we have learned the video was the work of Philip de Vellis, who was the Internet communications director for Sherrod Brown’s 2006 Senate campaign, and who now works at Blue State Digital, a company created by members of Howard Dean’s Internet Team.

De Vellis said in a blog post that he independently created the ad that he calls “Vote Different.” He has left Blue State Digital because of all the attention spurred on since the time of his March 5th uploading of the video to YouTube.

The video mashup man explained himself in that post:

I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it–by people of all political persuasions–will follow.

This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.

This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.

He spent a Sunday afternoon working on the video, taking care to make as few changes to it as possible as may be observed when viewing it and Apple’s original creation. After uploading it, he passed around the link to blogs and sat back to see what happened.

Now that we know, expect to see plenty of copycat efforts hit the Web next. De Vellis has staked out the ground for this, so he’ll likely be remembered after many of those potential copycats have been forgotten.

Politics is no different. Three notable Democrats who want to stake a claim to the White House in 2008 have brands to build, with varying degrees of difficulty to overcome. Social media has been demonstrated as one way to attract an audience and reinforce the message a brand wants to communicate.

The candidates have taken different steps to try and do what Howard Dean did in 2004

Democrats regained power in Congress in 2006, and they hope continued disenchantment with the former Republican majority that has lost its way could lead to a return to the White House.

As President Bush’s term counts closer to an end, a couple of high-profile Democrats have begun considering runs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008. Illinois freshman Senator Barack Obama has started an exploratory committee, while New York’s junior Senator and former White House occupant Hilary Rodham Clinton appears likely to announce her candidacy at any time.

Over two years in politics may as well be measured in galactic rotations; there’s a lot of time between now and November 2008. Right now, online analysis firm Hitwise has looked at Internet interest in the two candidates, and finds Obama has an edge.

“A quick look at the demographic composition of their two respective senate sites (obama.senate.gov and clinton.senate.gov) reveals an interesting breakdown in age between visitors to the two sites,” wrote Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer. “Barack seems to be resonating with the 25-44 year olds, while Clinton is showing a swing toward younger and older voters.”

A breakdown by important states also favors Obama currently. “While they both are clearly swinging in their represented state (Illinois and New York), the remaining top states are telling,” said Tancer. Obama has gained a lot of interest from visitors in his home state of Illinois, and in California, Ohio, Florida, and Michigan.

Clinton has fans in her home base of New York, and in Kansas, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Missouri. Obama has a decided edge when it comes to traditionally Democratic strongholds in this informal look.

When it comes to search, out of the total market share Obama has 0.0013 percent. Clinton’s search share registers only 0.00052 percent. As noted, it’s early in the game. This can all change overnight.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.