Will web video help create better-informed voters?  That’s a question asked by a very interesting 3-minute piece called “Web Video Impact on the Elections” on the Wall Street Journal online pages.

And it’s not just a marketing thing, either; it’s a counter-marketing tactic, as well.  Try searching, for example, for “Joe Lieberman” on YouTube.  You’ll pick up everything from spoofs to attacks to news stories to official promos — 201 entries in all, as of this writing.  That’s more than 6 hours of the good, the bad and the ugly about the Connecticut senator.  And it offers the same variability in quality and credibility as we’ve come to expect all across the web.  But anyone who spends more than a little time with this video collection will have a pretty good picture of the variety of views that exist on Lieberman.

Other politicians are thinner on entries.  My governor and possible presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for example, only has six videos about him.  But he’s not running yet, and can’t yet (officially) unleash a campaign machine on YouTube.

The point is that, in this Year of Web Video, we have a whole new slew of tactics available to candidates.  We’ll only be seeing the early “beta tests” of these methods this year, but rest assured they’ll be fully developed by 2008.