To both protect oneself and to target one’s opponent, David All has proposed “five essential tips for the YouTube campaign trail.” His suggestions are groundbreaking and thoughtful, but I’d like to add one more, albeit unrelated to YouTube: Develop software to download your opponent’s Web site once a day. You need not download the whole site, but, like a good backup program, only the pages that have changed since the last download.
Savvy readers will point out that Google already caches pages for free. In fact, Google’s cache was the source of this gotcha blog post by the Politico’s Ben Smith. This method is fine if you know that a change occurred within the past week or so, but if you don’t, your only other option is the Wayback Machine, which archives entire sites, but only twice a year.