NEW YORK — The Internet battle over the presidential campaign is ratcheting up following announcements by social-networking site MySpace and video-sharing hub YouTube that they plan live webcasts of town hall meetings and candidate debates leading up to the primaries.
Both said they seek to draw more voters into the political process, but the sites also are engaged in what is shaping up as an old-style media fight over online information consumers -- and the ad revenues they bring.
"It's almost like the 'browser battle' -- which site is the new e-mail? Which is the new standard for how people communicate?" said Eli Pariser, executive director of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org.
Credibility hangs in the balance as both sites seek to position themselves as more than one-trick ponies where users share passions for rock bands or post funny videos, said Josh Bernoff, a social-computing analyst at Forrester Research.
"Both MySpace and YouTube would like to establish themselves as serious political sites," he said. "They want to be broader, more multidimensional."
MySpace is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, YouTube by dominant search engine Google.
In a measure of the growing significance of online politics, key executives from major Web companies -- including Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt -- took part Friday in the fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York, a gathering of people trying to find new ways of inspiring political action via the Internet.
The potential pool is huge. More than 21 million people had viewed online political videos as of February, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, told the conference. And, he said, more than 24 million have participated in organized online lobbying campaigns.
Still, those numbers represent a relatively narrow slice of the electorate. In the last presidential election, about 122 million votes were cast.
The conference came a week after MySpace announced that it would hold a series of webcast town halls with Democratic and Republican presidential contenders, adding to a planned virtual primary in January.
"I think it is, unambiguously, a good thing not just for MySpace users and MySpace in general, but for the political process," said Jeff Berman, vice president for public affairs. "It doesn't matter how much money a campaign has or how highprofile the candidate is; if they have a message and deliver it, they will find an audience."
