Lisbeth links to a wonderful blog, techPresident – this is a group blog monitoring how US presidential candidates are using blogs, social software sites and other web 2.0 things in their campaigns, and how bloggers and other web users and sites and processes are changing the debate. In addition to frequent and interesting posts, they have a hilarious statistic on how many “friends” each candidate has on MySpace. You can also find useful charts, such as how frequently each candidate is mentioned in blogs. Here’s the chart for the Democrat candidates:

The blog is run by the Personal Democracy Forum, which is also hosting a very interesting-looking conference on May 18. The program isn’t up, but they have a great list of speakers. Here’s last year’s program. I’m thinking I’d love to go, would make perfect sense for the book I’m writing on blogs – and I have the funding – but it’s one day and the trans-continental flight would suck for the environment. I don’t so much mind the flight or the jetlag, I generally do quite well with those. And I like the frequent flier points. And New York.

Does anyone have experience with these conferences? I wonder whether I could just as well get the info from reading on- and offline or whether attending would really make my chapter on blogging and the public sphere significantly better? They had podcasts last year – but apparently only of short interviews after the official sessions.

(And what utter luxury to actually be able to choose whether to fly to New York like that. I’m lucky.)