Whistlestops in cyberspace

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"Campaign Web sites are the clearest demonstration of Web sites as advertisements," said Evans Witt, executive editor of Politics Now, a Web site that posts political stories from news organizations including ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. "This is not a negative comment. This is what the Web was designed for. Campaign sites do what corporate Web sites do: They make information available about the products that they have."

At least some Web surfers see a more negative element. John Montana, a biology researcher at Dana Farber in Boston and a frequent Net surfer, says he has been to the campaign sites for President Clinton, Republican challenger Bob Dole, and Sen. Bob Kerry (D-Massachusetts). But not for the facts.

"It is like being trapped in a political commercial on TV where all you ever hear is rhetoric and the facts that a particular side wants you to hear," he said. "I don't know if sites created by campaign staffs could ever be useful, since I see usefulness in terms of objectivity and these home pages are never objective. I want facts but not just bits and pieces of them."

Instead, Montana goes to Web sites set up by political magazines and newspapers for "objective" information. "They are more useful because they serve as a more reliable source," he said, adding that it is easy to find important information because news sites allow users to search candidates' voting records and policy positions.

So what is the future of Internet campaigning? That will depend, to a large extent, on the evolution of the medium itself.

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"Campaigns are creatures of the moment. They are not trendsetters; they will follow the technology," said Chad Kilbourne, executive assistant to the commissioner of housing and urban renewal in New York, who ran a regional campaign for George Pataki's 1994 successful bid for governor. "Until the Net is really a mass medium that can reach more voters than radio, more voters than TV, the campaign Web sites and chat rooms will never be anything more than a supplement to traditional campaign methods."