The Ring of Swords Being Drawn: Mayoral Site Check 13
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By now we know which mayoral candidates are using the Web to their advantage in this race, and which are treating it as a mere formality.
But on the eve of the first mayoral debate, just to keep track, here's the online view of the five guys preparing to argue over who should run Los Angeles:
Somebody over at AlarconforLA.com snapped awake and added the first post to the AlaBlog since its launch in July. The post touts a comedy benefit for Sen. Richard Alarcon tonight at the Ricardo Montalban Theater headlined by Paul Rodriguez. The site also carries a handful of headlines from the month covering things that Alarcon has said or done.
Jim Hahn's once-dormant campaign site is now completely missing but for a WhoIs record pointing to ownership of the JimHahn.org domain name by Gregory Hildebrand at BH firm Political Systems. Maybe Hahn's resting on his taxpayer-funded laurels, maybe something's still in the works. The funny thing is, Googling the mayor's name still brings up a Sponsored Link by his most web-savvy rival:
Bob Hertzberg, who has been whipping web technology around like a meth-crazed lion tamer. In addition to Google-hacking every major opponent, Hertzberg's campaign maintains a blogheadline-grabbing web staff. It offers the group-written and frequently-updated Hertz-blog. And the home page streams like a newsticker with the Hertzberg Daily Digest, which seems to have some poor staffer up into the wee hours linking to stories on politics, social issues, economic trends and critiques of Hahn from every major daily and blog in town, and even a few minor ones. At last count there were 41 posts with today's date - whoops, there goes another - make that 42.
Ex-LAPD Chief, Councilman and mortal Hahn-foe Bernard Parks' site posts a diatribe on Hahn's refusal to release crime statistics focused on Hahn's controversial 3-day work week for LAPD officers. He's even posted a sort of clock that track's Hahn's silence on the matter:
Criminals are working 7 days a week.
You are working 5 days a week.
Our police officers are working 3 days a week.
James Hahn doesn't seem to be working at all to fight crime.
It has been over 50 days since Hahn has refused to release deployment figures on the 3-day work week for police officers.
Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa has let his site languish, and completely abandoned any pretense to keeping up a weblog. The last press release - a weirdly jokey Jewish Journal piece about Jewish pols who back Villaraigosa's candidacy - is more than a month old. But hey, when you've raised more than $640,000 to Hahn's $2.2 million and Hertzberg's $1.1 million - uh, okay, when you've almost whipped Hahn once before, maybe you don't feel the need to lean on the medium that more people are visiting in unprecedented numbers to get their candidate information.
