With less than a year to go before election day, the battlefield is already crowded with troops. The Republican and Democrat primaries have brought all supporters and cybersupporters in the debate. Whereas a few months ago American candidates were sending envoys to France to spot the presidential netcampaign’s best practices, they are now the ones steering the wheel, finding new ways to campaign online, pushing further the borders of traditional politics. The netcampaign will take place in every corner of the Internet, from the now ancient e-mails and newsgroups to the new web 2.0 community sites and apps such as Twitter or Digg. It will visit both the most crowded spaces such as YouTube, MySpace or Facebook and the most confidential and secluded - what about some political debating in Lake Ontario’s fly fishing newsgroups? And of course it will still happen within the blogosphere, on thousands of opinion outlets held by supporters, journalists, candidates, writers or citizens. Continuously or from time to time, they will carry, consider or mix the impressive flow of texts, images and sounds published daily by the mass media and, more and more, by their peers.

What do we offer? Some perspective on this very dense flow of opinions. The ability to apprehend the size of this phenomenon by measuring it.

The first measures are made by the topographic surveyor: measure a territory, draw its borders, distinguish its vicinity, spot the highs and lows. The first territory we have mapped is not the multi-dimensional Internet, with too many fronts to cover at the same time! No, the first territory we’ve mapped is the political blogosphere, the territory of all the blogs that will follow and take part in this election. Maybe we should talk about the political webosphere as all the blogs contained therein are not isolated from their hypertextual environments, from sites they link to and they’re linked from. It is this whole ecosystem of intertwined websites that we’ve represented and that we’ll monitor in 2008.

Last spring, we mapped the French political webosphere within the context of the 2007 presidential election. The most astonishing part is that the pulse of this territory, as shown in the map and the various monitors we had set up, actually gave a very good idea of the final outcome, with the ones leading the race on the Internet actually leading the polls. Hence, we suggest you keep a close eye on Presidential Watch 2008 all along the year!

The troops are now ready and trained, the battlefield is before us. Let the political strategists unfold their maps and their most ambitious tactics.