• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 2, 2007

Don't expect to find the irreverent viral video that made YouTube a sensation on the new online hub the company unveiled Thursday showcasing 2008 presidential hopefuls. No doubt, that's the way the candidates like it.

YouTube's new You Choose '08 site brings together the individual video channels created by candidates including Barack Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. They can post videos addressing particular issues or other footage while members of the public can submit video responses or written comments.

But candidates have veto power over what appears on their channels, giving them a measure of control over embarrassing or undesired video surfacing on the Web. Featured on the sites so far is mostly professionally produced video of candidates giving speeches or in television appearances. Not exactly the kind of material that generates hundreds of thousands of downloads on YouTube.

"So far none of the presidential candidates have grasped what is essentially different about video online," said Michah Sifry, executive editor of Personal Democracy Forum, a site focusing on the nexus of technology and politics. "They still treat it like television on a smaller screen."

Instead of continuing to rely on the packaged programming that turns voters off, he said the candidates should be using the Internet to better show their true selves. "The public is hungry for an authentic candidate," said Sifry, whose site recently started a new multi-author blog, TechPresident.com, focusing on how the Web is affecting the 2008 presidential campaign.

An entry on the blog today offered five tips for candidates to navigate YouTube, including "Just because you create a new video or post it at your Web site, that does not mean you should post it on your YouTube channel," and "Talk with us, not at us."

Certainly candidates are eager to avoid anything like a "macaca" moment being captured on tape. Former Sen. George Allen of Virginia wound up losing a hard-fought election last fall after a video showing him referring to a rival campaign staffer as "macaca," an African monkey and also a racial slur.

Nevertheless, candidates in what's already been dubbed the first "YouTube election" are fanning out across the Internet in hopes of connecting with younger voters, especially on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The TechPresident.com blog has even created a widget to track which candidates in both parties have attracted the most "friends" on MySpace. (So far, it's Obama.)

But to find a politician who really knows how to use the Web, Sifry advised looking overseas to British Conservative Party leader David Cameron. His Webcameron site is "very casual, sincere and relatively unscripted," he said. "He's much further along than any American candidate online."