YouTube and CNN have been receiving debate questions for about a week now. And so far, there are only 120 submissions. I kind of thought the number would be much higher by now. And it’s not like CNN and YouTube aren’t hyping it. How much would an ad cost, for example, right underneath the search box on Google’s homepage asking for debate question submissions? Becasue Google owns YouTube, and because Google doesn’t usually run ads on its homepage at all, I’m not sure how they’re costing the ad, but it’s certainly beach-front property.

Couple lackluster enthusiasm for the YouTube debate format with this article from the Politico regarding the RNC’s new “new media” hire:

The party’s new eCampaign director, Cyrus Krohn, is a new media veteran who helped start the Web magazine Slate in 1996 and is now the director of election strategy at Yahoo!. His hire comes after a nearly six-month vacancy at the RNC that had raised concerns among some tech-savvy Republicans that the party was losing its Web edge.
Much-cited measures of online interest show the top Democratic candidates – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) – outpacing the Republican front-runners. Their videos are more frequently watched on YouTube, and they have more “friends” on the social networking site MySpace.
Krohn, however, dismisses those measures as “fads.”
“There’s a lot of activity going on on the Web that’s not being fully harnessed now, largely because of the fad factor,” he said in an interview from Yahoo!’s Santa Monica, Calif., office.
He argues that the underused political frontier isn’t new social sites like YouTube and MySpace but the (relatively) old titans of the Web, presumably referring to firms such as AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN, and their Latino cousins.
“I look at the universe of some of the sites that have fallen out of favor that still have audiences that anyone would be attracted to – audiences in the hundreds of millions,” Krohn said, adding that he would not “rely so much on the sites that are so much in the lexicon today.”

And add in this report that Rupert Murdoch wants out of MySpace and into Yahoo…

Washington – News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch has been discussing a deal to swap his My Space social-networking site with Yahoo for a one-quarter stake in the Internet portal – even as he pursues his $5 billion offer for Dow Jones.
The talks with Yahoo are preliminary and began before chief executive Terry Semel resigned Monday, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussion is ongoing.
It is unclear whether the talks will move forward under Semel’s successor, Jerry Yang.

…and it’s starting to look like YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace won’t have the hyped affect on 2008 as many have predicted.