Here are my notes for the talk I'm about to give at Politics Web 2.0 on "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America.” (Caveat emptor, your experience may vary.)

The Web on the Candidates

Blogpac, a group comprised of MyDDers Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, and Mike Stark that gives grants to online progressive activists, has awarded $1000 to former John Edwards blogger Amanda Marcotte "for her courage in the face of an irresponsible media." Earlier this year, a mini-scandal erupted after conservatives criticized comments Marcotte had written on her Pandagon blog before she was hired by the Edwards campaign. In the post announcing the award, Mike Stark gives us Marcotte's story, from the time she was hired by the campaign (she was working as a financial aid counselor at UT-Austin) to how the cable news sites helped blow the thing out of proportion to how and why she resigned from the campaign.

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post explains that the Democrats are beating the GOP online, getting more traffic, raising more money, and gaining more popularity on the "social-networking triumvirate" of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. TechPresident's Mike Turk says that it goes beyond using the right technologies. "They've all got Web sites. Yes, they're doing videos. Yes, some are blogging. But that's not enough to really connect with voters." And while Republicans are fighting back, with TechPresident's David All forming TechRepublican and former Reagan campaign aide Charlie Gerow starting QubeTV to counter what he calls the "liberal bias" of YouTube, All says "for the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000."

The Web on the Candidates

Joe Anthony, the creator of an unofficial MySpace Barack Obama profile who had a well-documented brush-up with the Obama campaign over control of the profile, has decided to take down his old unofficial profile. This morning he wrote on his blog, "I've had some time to relax and think about what's next, and decided it's best to delete this profile and start anew. Regardless of the outcome, we accomplished a lot here on Myspace. We built the biggest profile, the biggest community of supporters, for any candidate on Myspace and I think we all did an amazing job. We did this together, before the campaign or Myspace even got involved... I'm going to stay positive and look forward to the next opportunity, whether it includes Myspace or not. I hope I'll meet some of you along the way." It's still up this morning but will apparently be deleted sometime today.

Scott Keyes at Political Insider does a quick roundup of the candidates' Facebook profiles, offering one factoid per candidate. Examples: Hillary Clinton is "the only candidate in either party to not list his or her relationship status. Everyone else listed 'married.'" Joe Biden "lists his political views as 'liberal' and is the only candidate to do so." Dennis Kucinich is "in a Facebook group called 'Free Hugs.'" Mitt Romney said that "Battlefield Earth was his favorite novel, [but] it isn't listed among favorite books; the classic American novel Huckleberry Finn is listed instead." And Sam Brownback also likes his science fiction: he "lists The Lord of the Rings before The Bible in his list of favorite books." (thanks Colin!)

It's late on a Saturday and I don't have a lot of time to get into details, but for those people who have been following the Obama MySpace Mess, a quick heads-up is in order. Joe Anthony, the volunteer who started myspace.com/barackobama and built it for two-and-a-half years only to lose control of it last week to the Obama campaign, has posted a detailed critique of the official blog post written by Obama new media director Joe Rospars. You won't want to miss it.

The dust is starting to settle on Obama's MySpace Mess. For those people who imagined that Joe Anthony might turn to the courts and sue the Obama campaign for taking control of a community space that he spent two-and-a-half years and thousands of hours nurturing, that move is fortunately for all concerned not in the cards.

One of the underlying issues raised by Obama's MySpace Mess is just what it takes to build a mega-group on a big social networking site, and how to value that work. I want to get into that here.

This issue [Obama's MySpace Brouhaha] reminds me of questions that we had to deal with all the time on the Dean campaign. We called people like Joe Anthony "centers of gravity"-- people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

It's been quite a day out here on the internets, with the blogosphere buzzing over our story yesterday of how Obama volunteer Joe Anthony lost control of his MySpace Obama page to the pros at the Obama campaign. And now it looks like we're going to have another day to chew over the story, for the candidate himself and the campaign's internet director have waded into the fray.

A little while ago, just before Obama internet director put up a long post explaining his version of the events surrounding Anthony's MySpace adventure, Senator Obama personally called Anthony at home.

In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before. "I was just blown away," he told me. He put time into the site every day, answering emails from people wanting to "friend" the page, pointing them to voter registration information, and, once Obama threw his hat into the ring, telling them where to find out more detailed positions of the candidate.

By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile--which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama--already had more than 30,000 friends, well more than the other contenders. Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the "MySpace primary." Yesterday, the profile had just over 160,000 friends. Today, that url has only about 12,000. And it's under new ownership. Joe Anthony, one of the super volunteers of the Connected Age, has lost control of the page he started to the professionals on Obama's staff. How all this happened is a complicated tale that is still unfolding, and none of the parties involved--Anthony, the Obama online team, and the MySpace political operation--emerge from this story unscathed.

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