Playing the part

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson's website, http://www.fred08.com/, was the most-visited website among those of all presidential candidates for the week ended Sept. 8, receiving 34 percent of US visits to all the presidential candidate websites for that week, according to Hitwise data, reports MarketingCharts.

Barack Obama's website, http://www.barackobama.com/, received 13.49 percent of US visits for the week, and was the second most-visited candidate site. Republican candidate Ron Paul's website, http://www.ronpaul2008.com/, was third, receiving12.88 percent of visits.

Visitors to Fred Thompson's site were primarily male (65.56 percent) and older (40.28 percent were 55 or older) during the four weeks ended Sept. 8. Some 10.86 percent of Fred08.com traffic came from Tennessee online users.

Among Republicans only, the sites of Thompson (55.02 percent of visits) and Paul (20.41 percent) were followed by those of Mike Huckabee (7.59 percent), John McCain (5.3 percent) and Mitt Romney (5.03 percent), with the share of most US visits to Republican presidential candidates.

Among Democrats only, Obama's website (36.59 percent of visits) was followed by those of Hillary Clinton (28.15 percent), John Edwards (17.67 percent), Joe Biden (5.79 percent) and Dennis Kucinich (5.67 percent).

Traffic from select Web 2.0 websites, including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, increased 205 percent to all the candidate websites in August 2007 compared with January 2007, Hitwise said.

Republican Ron Paul received the most traffic from the select group of Web 2.0 websites, followed by Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to the data.

"The online focus of the last presidential election was all about blogs and their effectiveness in communicating with potential voters," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. "In the 2008 Presidential election, the internet's role is changing from a one-way communication channel to a two-way conversation enabled by social networking."