Back in March of last year, a video mashup shook up the political scene, when some anonymous tech sleuth had the audacity to attack Hillary Clinton. The video was posted at YouTube under the name "ParkRidge47," a sly reference to Hillary Clinton's childhood home town. The message: Hillary Clinton is Big Brother, or at least, Hillary Clinton is having an Orwellian "one-way" conversation with America -- and one candidate, a-la-Apple Computers classic 1984 Superbowl ad, can change that. It closed with a scroll directing people to the website of Hillary's chief rival, BarackObama.com.

Cue the video in the event that you were not one of the 4,000,000+ viewers who watched it:

After the unmasking of the video-masher, the popular thinking was that the 2008 elections were going to be fraught with these kind of new, or modern media, attacks. To my knowledge, there hasn't been another viral video that has "tipped," (as Malcolm Gladwell might put it), at least not the same way the Vote Different video did. Instead, I think we've seen a proliferation of campaign-based web videos. Nothing challenged Phil de Vellis's little masterpiece.

At least, that is, until about two weeks ago. Cut to the new video:

This video too was posted by an anymous YouTuber, though, to be fair, it appears "keithhib" is a McCain fan. No surprise there--I think last weekend's debates showed that Mitt and John aren't the best of friends. Self-disclosure: I find myself squarely in the McCain column as well.

Now maybe some of you don't remember Max Headroom (see YouTube clips here). Wikipedia has this on file, " artificial intelligence, known for his surreal wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice."

You get it? Max Headroom, the contrived marketing device is Mitt Romney, or something like that. Now leaving aside whether Romney has flipped or "evolved" on several issues--the video doesn't really hit that note--one fact is certain: Mitt has probably outspent most of the other GOP candidates on advertising. So there's a certain guerilla nature to this video.

Now for some analysis: the Max Headroom / Mitt Romney mashup isn't perfect, in fact, it leaves something to be desired. The "Vote Different" ad was more than a minute in length; the "Max Romney" vid is half that.

Is this video in any way effective? Will it go viral like the Hillary-1984 mashup? If not, why not? Do the Romney folks have anything to be worried about? Will a lot of people just be saying: that's cute, but so what? I'm interested to see what TechRepublican readers think.

The Telegraph.co.uk recently released a list of the top 100 conservatives and liberals. Here are the Republican presidential candidates along with some other name of note that made the list.

The Candidates:

• #1 Rudy Giuliani
• #9 John McCain
• #10 Mitt Romney
• #11 Mike Huckabee
• #58 Fred Thompson
• #97 Ron Paul

Names of Note:

• #3 Matt Drudge (props to internet journalism)
• # 21 George Bush
• #26 James Dobson
• #47 Joe Liberman (also made #47 on the liberal list)
• #71 Chuck Norris
• #85 Clarence Thomas (why so low?)

Liberal Listings of note:

• #8 Arnold Schwarzenegger
• #23 Colin Powell
• #62 Jerome Armstrong (co host of the poplar DomeNation with our own David All)

Some thoughts:

• The liberal side had more actors and musicians than the conservative side
• Barack Obama, his wife and his media strategist all made the cut
• A lot of Bloggers made the cut on both sides of the proverbial aisle
• Quite a few news anchors are on each list

From all this I gather that in order to be influential one needs to... run for public office, be a news anchor, be an actor or become a blogging phenom :-)

Any thoughts on the top 100 lists?

UPDATE (David All):: Erick Erickson of Redstate deservedly pulled #69:

69. ERICK ERIKSON
Blogger

ERICK ERIKSON

Founder and CEO of the conservative website redstate.com who also blogs on his personal site erickerickson.org, entitled Confessions of a Political Junkie, and on Georgia politics at peachpundit.com. A Republican political consultant and self-described “recovering lawyer”.

At just 32, Erickson epitomises the new power of the internet. A small-government fiscal and social conservative based in the south, he taps into and influences the Republican “base” that the GOP’s 2008 candidates are courting. Only started blogging in 2003.

Congrats Erick.

You know that when a campaign puts the words, "Yes, we're serious" in a campaign e-mail, it's gonna be good.

Mitt Romney's create-your-own-ad contest is exactly the kind of online innovation I've been waiting for out of the Republican candidates for President. The winning ad gets a real, live media buy. In other words, supporters are co-creating something of actual value and importance to the campaign. That's meaningful, and supporters get that.

Lots of user-generated content contests fail because the sponsor tries to create an incentive that exists only in the online parallel universe. Users sense the second-class treatment, and yawn. This is gutsier because they're putting real dollars behind it (hopefully it won't be just a phantom buy), and after MoveOn's Hitler ads, the quintessential example of bad user generated content, it's particularly bold.

The JumpCut platform will help the campaigns manage the flow, and give even average users the chance to edit a video. The production values and complexity of the winning video probably won't match what the TV admakers can put together. But does it matter? Wasn't the great thing about "The Pitch," the best campaign video of 2004, the fact that it was understated -- effectively a bunch of photos stitched together? (See if you can remember the narrator.)

Plus, as has been pointed out before with user-generated contests like this, the genius is not what happens with the winner, but how the also-rans take pride in their videos and spread them through their personal networks. This is a creative way to spread the Romney message with hundreds of small videos distributed throughout the Web.