Rudy Giuliani on MySpace, Barack Obama on Flickr and Hillary Clinton on Twitter (no updates yet, Hillary, what gives?); presidential candidates from across the political spectrum are rushing to web 2.0 sites to spread their message, but none moreso than John Edwards. 

According to this handy chart, Mr Edwards’s campaign is active on 25 different web communities, from mainstays like YouTube and MySpace to less well known sites like Blip.tv and hi5. That is five times the number of sites of his next-closest competitors in the 2008 race.

Less may be more when it comes to a campaigner’s web presence, however. All those web sites seem to be proving hard to manage. A quick visit to the candidate’s Bebo page on Friday morning revealed that it has been vandalised for the past two days by a rather crudely drawn phallus (careful - link may not be safe for work).

Somehow we doubt that this was the kind of exposure Mr Edwards was looking for.

Update: It looks like Mr Edwards’s Bebo profile has been deleted!

For all the attention focused on Microsoft’s potential acquisition of DoubleClick, there’s one key wrinkle that has been overlooked - at least, that’s what Mark Cuban thinks.

One of our intrepid reporters caught up with the baseball owner and Scourge of YouTube at the bar of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. According to Cuban, DoubleClick’s real value to Microsoft may be that it serves ads for YouTube. As a result, it could give Bill Gates and company a privileged view into Google’s efforts to commercialise the site (though $2bn sounds a lot to pay for that inside look.)

Meanwhile, Barry Diller seems to be almost as pessimistic as Cuban about YouTube’s chances of success in its efforts to reach an accord with the media industry. In this FT interview, he says it would be a tough sale even for a legendary negotiator like Henry Kissinger.

John Rodman, Xbox group product manager, has a car analogy for the new Elite addition to the 360 family.

“Think of BMW with its 3, 5 and 7 Series, we are now adding the 7 series,” he said.

Microsoft’s 3 is its Xbox 360 Core System, which sells without a hard drive for $300. Its 5 is the Premium System, with a 20Gb hard drive and costing $400. Its 7 - the Elite - has a 120Gb drive and HDMI high-definition connections for $480.

But the 7 Series ranks as BMW’s ultimate luxury car and the Elite does not quite match up to that in games console terms.

Its hard drive is twice the size of the $600 PlayStation 3, but while the PS3 has a Blu-ray high-definition DVD drive, the Elite has not been fitted with a comparable HD-DVD drive.

Part of the reason may be price - adding the drive would make the Elite at least as expensive as the PS3 – but the absence also suggests a lack of confidence that HD-DVD will survive in the standards war with Blu-ray.

Elite users will instead have to satisfy any HD cravings with Microsoft’s online offerings through Xbox Live.

Mr Rodman emphasised that Microsoft was number one in the US in the online distribution of TV shows and movies to the living room. It was also the only online distributor of high-definition films and television programming.

The Elite’s 160Gb hard drive will allow users to store more of their downloaded TV shows and high-definition movies.

It also points the way to the Xbox becoming a digital video recorder when the software upgrade is available later this year to enable live IPTV.

Microsoft research shows users are spending more than 40 per cent of their time using the Xbox 360 for music, movies and TV.

With a host of new media content partnerships announced today, that figure can only rise further.

(Footnote: The black Xbox Elite should be a good living-room match up alongside Pioneer’s Elite range of receivers and TVs – as long as Pioneer doesn’t mind Microsoft mimicking the brand.)

Here is another bit of technology that Europeans do well: corporate websites.

FT Digital Business is on Wednesday publishing a new index of corporate websites, evaluating these on how well they serve various groups such as customers, investors, members of the press, jobseekers and society in general.

The big surprise is that European companies dominate the rankings, with eight out of the top ten slots. Siemens, Royal Dutch Shell and BP are in the lead. Only two US companies – IBM and General Electric - make the fist ten.

David Bowen, who’s consultancy Bowen Craggs created the index says US companies may have been the first to have corporate websites but have been “resting on their laurels” for too long.

In contrast, Mr Bowen says many European companies have had a serious revamp of their websites in the last two or three years. One company – which he prefers us not to name – found it was spending £30m a year on hundreds of websites around the world which were not coherently planned or measurable for return on investment. Shocked, it undertook a big overhaul and now has an exemplary web presence.

What is also interesting about the list is that controversial companies like Siemens and BP seem to have the best websites. Perhaps they hope a polished website will distract from tarnished reputations?

US companies can take some comfort, however, from the fact that Asian corporate websites are even worse. They don’t even make the top 20. Toyota Motor scrapes in at number 28.

Tinkerers have begun to take apart Apple’s new Apple TV set-top box to have a look at its guts. The results suggest that there is much more to the Apple TV than meets the eye.

From the outside, Apple TV resembles a big iPod. Like an iPod, it is intended to be used to store and play back (or in some cases stream) content downloaded directly from iTunes.

But according to tech blogger Andrew Schmitt, the Apple TV is not so much a big iPod as it is a stand-alone PC that could provide a platform for future applications that have yet to be revealed:

"The [Apple TV] is a full fledged mini-PC…The modest [Apple TV] hardware is general-purpose enough to equal the computing power of a 2-3 year old laptop, which means it is capable of doing pretty interesting stuff. While the [Apple TV] is a dumb, headless, media extender today, all of the hardware potential exists for this device to be a portal for web based computing. Apple will roll these features out over time."

If true, such a revealed features approach would be a clever way of managing expectations. Rather than hyping the Apple TV as a device that is meant to revolutionise the living room right out of the gate, only to scale back its ambitions later (as Microsoft did with the Xbox 360), Apple could simply unveil new features that have already been built in by issuing software upgrades. As Mr Schmitt writes:

"I can imagine… Joe consumer powers up hit iTV one day and suddenly he can play tetris, order pizza, you name it. The disruption to the telco incumbents is only just beginning." 

Given the mixed responses to Apple TV thus far, such talk may be premature.

The Silicon Valley moneymen are cutting their ties to Google. Last week came news that Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital is stepping down from the board. Now the San Jose Mercury News reports that John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins has sold 1.1m shares (slightly more than 200,000 of which were sold on behalf of Kleiner clients.)

On the face of it, there doesn’t look to be anything too unusual about any of this - after all, Google has been a public company for more than two and a half years. The early investors need to cash in sometime.

Timing, though, is everything. Look at Moritz’s history as an investor. When Google was forced to cut the price range for its IPO in 2004 (remember the notorious Playboy interview and other slip-ups?) Sequoia backed away from selling any shares at all. It gambled (rightly) that the stock would take off later. During 2005, as Google first hit $500 (current price: $465) Moritz went on to sell nearly half his stake, while Doerr largely held on.

Is now the moment to head for the exits? The Google share price has gone nowhere for the past 15 months. It’s a truism of the venture capital business that the really big gains from investing in start-ups come in the years after they have gone public, not before. It seems that the Valley’s smart money has decided that the big profits have already been made.

Those who complain that Europe doesn’t produce enough big and ambitious technology companies should look for a moment at MySQL, the open source database company, started by two Swedes and a Finn.

This is one investors should be looking at in any case, as the company has started signalling plans for an IPO on the Nasdaq before the end of the year.

MySQL is the unknown giant of the database world. It’s kept a low profile so far in the financial press, but is well known among the internet community. Most internet sites, in fact, are to some extent built on its technology.

Because basic MySQL database code can be used for free, a lot of internet start-ups with small budgets used it to build their databases. Now some of these companies have grown into Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Neopets and the like, giving MySQL an enviable client list.

Marten Mikos, chief executive, told me the company estimates it has 10m customers, putting it at the number three position in the database market behind Oracle and Microsoft. He believes the company recently overtook IBM’s D2 database division.

According to Mr Mikos, the 10m-user estimate is extremely conservative. The company doesn’t know exactly how many users it has, but it does know that 25m copies of its product are requested every year. If customers use the software for say, seven years on average, that would be 175m users.

What is the catch? Only one in a thousand users pay MySQL anything.

The basic database tools are completely free. You only pay if you want some support from the company, or you want to build your own closed-source application on top of the MySQL code.

Revenues were just E40m in 2006. They have grown exponentially from around E1.5m in 2001, but are still far short of Oracle’s $14.38bn in 2006.

Within the next 10 years, the company is aiming to reach revenues of around $1bn, as the number of paying users grow.

This will be against a generally declining database market, as more and more companies go for free, open-source software.

Danny Rimer, the venture capitalist whose firm, Index Ventures is a backer of MySQL, said Mr Mikos’ initial pitch to him was both stark and breathtakingly ambitious.

Sitting in a grubby Stockholm youth hostel, he told Mr Rimer: “The database market is currently worth about $9bn. We will shrink that to one third of its current size and take a third of the rest.”

This is not a European company lacking ambition.  

It has some way to go, but Mr Rimer, known for his role as one of the earliest backers of Skype, believes him.

Keeping this short. The new style. Microblogging for the lazy. Say it in 140 characters or less on Twitter or keep a scrapbook in Tumblr.

Tabblo, the latest addition to Hewlett-Packard’s photo printing portfolio, is an interesting case study of how computer and printer maker is trying to branch out from its inkjet and laserjet roots in search of new growth.

Tabblo, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a nifty little web site that lets users take photos from their computers or from any number of other photo sites like Flickr, and turn them into products like posters, coffee mugs, and the like.

The site relies on Ajax to make it easy for its 150,000 or so users to drag and drop photos in text into a variety of customizable layouts. As it happens, HP has been investing heavily in printers that can churn out high-quality prints of photos, posters, calendars and even hard-bound books.

It’s all part of an effort to capture more of the trillions of pages printed around the world each year. The more pages HP captures, the more high-margin ink, equipment and services HP sells. Considering that Tabbo’s acquisition price is unlikely to amount to any more than a rounding error on its P&L statement, it looks to be a savvy move.

NBC and News Corp have come up with their response to YouTube: don’t wait for the audience to come to you, find a reason for all the big internet distributors to carry your TV shows. However, their new joint venture for online distribution leaves at least five important questions unanswered:

1. What share of the ad revenues have they had to give up to persuade Yahoo! et al to give their video player a position of prominence? The big Web networks are amassing big video libraries of their own: will they give pride of place to old media shows, and how much will they charge for the privelege?

2. How long will it take the anti-trust regulators to open an investigation? Expect to hear NBC and News Corp say that they will still be prepared to license their shows to internet companies in other forms, provided of course that the terms are fair and reasonable. But will that really be true, now they have combined their muscle to try to carve out their own space on the home pages of all the big Web portals?

3. Can NBC and News Corp persuade other TV companies and movie studios to join them? Every media company seems to be pursuing a strategy of "super-syndication" on the Web - distribute your content as widely as possible and collect a share of ad revenue along the way. But there isn’t room on Yahoo!’s home page for everyone. Will the Web become a clutter of competing video players?

4. How long will it take before the TV companies fall out with each other? For now, there’s a good reason to band together: to try to stop Google owning online video. If they succeed in taming YouTube, expect their interests to start diverging again.

5. Who wants full-length TV shows on the internet anyway? There’s a reason users love YouTube: they want the highlights, not the whole thing. The TV companies are still resisting the pressure to "unbundle" their content so that users can digest it in the form they want.