Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its representatives in Washington, was going to save their skins, was exhilarating. And then, when the bill went down to defeat, and the market went back to plunging, I was thrilled.

Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to connect together and have a meaningful voice in the process. The bailout bill, and the process by which it is being jammed through Congress, is an affront to those democratic values. We can do better. And the vote Monday showed, in nascent form, how the same forces that are eating away at the underpinnings of "broadcast politics," the capital-intensive way of electing a President whose demise we've been chronicling here at techPresident, are also starting to unsettle "business as usual" on Capitol Hill.

But this development is more properly seen as a natural evolution in any open, networked system that is allowed to operate in the political space. The credit belongs to his supporters, not Obama.

It's now a truism that when presented with an open platform, users will hack it to serve their purposes, not necessarily those of the sponsor. Many times, those two sets of priorities are intertwined (e.g. supporters desire to get involved matched with a campaign's need for volunteers), though in this case, they weren't.

Government is not the enemy, writes guest author Matthew Burton, a technologist who consults for the intelligence community, as well as a transparency activist. It's time for the loose coalition of bloggers, web developers, engineers, activists, philanthropists and agitators who believe in government transparency, election reform and weakening the influence of lobbyists and big donors to change how government functions by actually going inside it and making direct change happen.

He writes: "We need a community of coders who are committed to improving the inner workings of DC, and doing it in a way that inherently promotes transparency while fighting government waste. We need a Mozilla Foundation for the government. A stateside Geekcorps. A geeky Americorps. An army of impassioned programmers committed to improving the government’s information services, both internal and those it provides to the public. It would make government more organized, accountable and effective, and it would save them a lot of tax dollars. And the result—open access to the code that runs our country—is a great first step toward the kind of government transparency we’re after."

Here's a tale of two radically different uses of technology on Capitol Hill: the first to keep all but the most-connected people out, and the second to let the rest of us in. In the first case, we have Members of Congress who are crack-berry addicts staying in permanent contact with their cronies and donors, even on the floor where lobbyists are supposedly banned. And in the second case, we have a Republican Congressman who is Twittering from what he calls the "deepest and darkest hole" in Congress.

A new article in Yale's Journal of Law & Technology offers up a somewhat counterintuitive new online plan for the next presidential administration to make government more useful, more accountable, and more transparent -- in short, give up.

Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.

Yesterday, something like $15 million to $20 million allegedly was donated to the Clinton, Obama and McCain campaigns online. We don't really know for sure.

So now the Clinton campaign is walking back has clarified its post-PA fundraising numbers (and I'm clarifying my initial post as well). As I noted yesterday, the campaign's finance co-chair Hassan Nemazee left the distinct impression with both the Washington Post and Business Week that the campaign had somehow pulled in more than $10 million "overnight" from Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary. Today's New York Times and Washington Post both take those claims as achievements, but Peter Daou, the campaign's internet director, makes clear that they haven't quite made it there yet $10M was a projection that the campaign put out midday and hit sometime last night. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has probably pulled in $6.5 million since Tuesday, and most of that was before it started an email push in response to Clinton's claims.

As I suspected, the "Hillary raised $10 million online overnight" report that the Washington Post ran with earlier today was too good to be true. I don't know if the mistake is the reporter's or if someone at Camp Hillary was spinning a bit too fast, but there's no way they raised that much since her win in Pennsylvania yesterday.

The use of Twitter as a discovery vehicle for raw political intelligence takes another step today with Election Journal, a project by Republican election watchdog Mike Roman. The site is using Twitter, Flickr, and Google Maps to cover primary election day in Philadelphia, with Twittering correspondents stationed around the city.