Andrew Cherwenka posted an interesting article last night called Antisocial Web Marketing: Why McCain is Losing. While I’m personally not willing to jump to the conclusion that what’s happening on the web is the main reason he appears to be losing, the comparison between how the two leaders (& parties) are represented is startling. One would have thought that after all the stories about how Obama’s online presence was key to his triumph in the Democratic primaries would have led McCain’s team to focus on this… but apparently not.

Side note: for previous coverage of the role of wikinomics in this race, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Most interesting stat in the story? The top-20 user uploaded YouTube results for McCain are negative, and the top-20 for Obama are positive. Maybe there’s a user demographic story behind this, but it is quite startling to pull up and compare the lists… and that doesn’t even include all the Palin fiascoes. It’s also interesting to compare the “Obama Everywhere” list (social networking and Web 2.0 links that go well beyond Facebook to places like Flickr, Digg, AsianAve, etc.) to McCain’s site which seems to barely have integrated an email invite application. If you look hard enough you can find links to his Facebook and MySpace pages… but the sites are kind of dead.

For example, I clicked on the “MySpace Blog” link… it hasn’t been updated since September 8th, and prior to that was used exclusively to announce TV events. On the Facebook page, there hasn’t been a posted item or note since August, and there hasn’t been a video posted in 5 months. Though, to be fair, Obama’s Facebook page does have some similar problems… but part of this may be explained by the fact he’s using the main site has an hub to many interesting links, like the Flickr site, Twitter, and a variety of others.

My sense is that while seemingly light years ahead of every politician he competes with, Obama is just scratching the surface in terms of using the Web 2.0 for promoting a political campaign. Can’t wait to see what happens next time…