Ron Paul, Relaunched and Back in Pajamas

Radley's still waiting to confirm Paul's fundraising numbers, but here are two minor bits of Paul web news.

– Paul's official campaign site has relaunched and the new engine (built by Terra Eclipse) is pretty impressive. The social networking sites—Facebook, MySpace et al—where Paul has had so much success are prominently linked on the front page and integrated into the site. The donate/volunteer/join a local group features are only a little less intense than the top tier candidates' features, about as well-designed as Bill Richardson's, better than Mike Huckabee's. It looked for a while like Paul's internet surge was going to continue as a decentralized, chaotic force as he ran with a typical low-budget website. This makes Paul look more credible—if you hear about the guy for the first time during a debate and you click on his site, he looks as on-the-ball as the rest of the field.

– Speaking of credibility, Paul is back in the storied Pajamas Media poll, having hit 1 percent again in Gallup's survey. But it doesn't really matter anymore, as the fussing and rule-writing and hand-wringing by PJM drove away all interest in the poll. The first week (before Ron Paul was even added), 19,539 people voted in the poll. The last week (Feb 19-26) that Paul was included, when he won the GOP poll, 9360 people voted. When Paul was purged, the votes fell to 7393. Last week, as the oddball Gallupcentric rules included Al Sharpton (who got second place!) and George Pataki but excluded Paul, a rock-bottom 3135 people voted in the poll.

It was all a very weird, very unneccessary lesson in how trying to control an online community eventually brings on extinction, or at least dwindling popularity.

Not like they couldn't have used that traffic…