Obama reaches 2 million donors, BarelyPolitical barely keeps my attention, McCain's tech policy review, techPresident is honored with a nomination, Obama and McCain's YouTube channels

"Drill Here, Drill Now" will give you gas, MyBO gets people riled up with new scoring system, McCain will announce a tech policy, more video-generated content

The online mini-rising to protest Barack Obama's support for the Congressional compromise to renew the FISA legislation has been getting a lot of attention, with much being made (by us and plenty of others, including Ari Melber in the Nation, The New York Times, et al) that activists are using Obama's own social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com, to organize and channel their efforts to get him to alter his stand. Indeed, as of today the Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right group has swelled to more than 14,000 members, which makes it the single largest self-organized group on the whole platform, which reportedly has close to a million registered members.

This is certainly a good example of what thinkers like Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce have been talking about, when it comes to "ridiculously easy group formation" (qua Shirky) and how "Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment" (qua Pesce). But right now the main reason this development is important is NOT because the group itself is that powerful; it's because attention-amplifiers in the blogosphere and the MSM are covering the story and thus threatening some of Obama's hard-won image as a change agent, which could conceivably weaken his vaunted fundraising and organizing machine. So while the Obama campaign is keeping a poker face about the importance of some of its members using the master's tools to challenge his position, it is no doubt paying attention, too.

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

My.BarackObama.com still works, and it's not because recreated the features of a social network. If they've succeeded, it's because they've harkened back to the early days of the web, to the primary way that the online grassroots connected with each other before blogs: e-mail groups.

Joe Trippi is one of the few political consultants who speaks frankly, even to the detriment of his clients, and loves democracy even more than he loves politics. I caught up with him for an hour-long conversation about his work for the John Edwards campaign, why Hillary Clinton might be the Howard Dean of 2008, and how the Iowa caucus is like the Internet.