A new meme is spreading around the Tubes, and it’s a good one. Clay Shirky, part sociologist and part technologist, has coined the term “Cognitive Surplus”. Shirky, the author of the must-read Here Comes Everybody, gave a talk the other week on the topic. The implications of this idea in the political arena are already becoming apparent, and the Obama campaign seems to be the most able to harness it.

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 Clinton campaign says it raised $2.5 million online last night in the three hours after the Pennsylvania primary was called, and 80% of that came from new donors. But the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute reports that she is still way behind Barack Obama in tapping the small-donor gusher online.

In the world of small business entrepreneurship, especially technology startups in Silicon Valley, a standard process has evolved dictating how to raise money to start a company. Similarly, in the mass media era of political campaigns, a funding process is also followed, albeit far different from that of Silicon Valley. A national political campaign is expected to raise large amounts of money from a relatively small amount of wealthy donors, and then use that money for large media buys in a relatively small amount of media markets in order to win an election. The Obama campaign has completely dismantled that fundraising equation, and there's much more to it than just small donations over the Internet. The Obama campaign's fundraising approach in many ways mirrors the angel funding strategy of a Silicon Valley startup.

Sometime today, I presume, the Obama campaign will reveal its total fundraising haul for the month of February, and everyone will go gaga. Whatever the actual number--$35 million is the low estimate (which would match the Clinton campaign's take), $70 million is Republican consultant and techPresident blogger Patrick Ruffini's plausible prediction (which would be nearly six times John McCain's reported February income)--it's important to put this into more dramatic perspective. He has more individual contributors than the entire large donor pool to federal campaigns and parties in 2000, and nearly as many as in 2004. Already.

You know when something is spreading online when your friends ask you about it spontaneously. That's how I heard about feminist Robin Morgan's online rallying cry for Hillary Clinton, "Goodbye To All That (#2)," which has been circulating widely since she posted it on the Women's Media Center website on February 2nd. And then Chelsea Clinton started forwarding it around...

The latest news on the Democratic fundraising front is astounding.

The online fundraising war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has turned into a daily battle of the press releases, and it's hard to say for sure what the numbers truly mean.