Barack Obama, will you tap the groundswell?

I started to watch at 6 a.m. Finnish time when the result was more or less clear. Within two hours John McCain congratulated the new president-elect, Mr. Obama Barack. Olli satyed up all night and watched the evolution through Internet.

Barack Obama, will you tap the groundswell?: "Like many of you, I watched the election last night, and watched Barack Obama's acceptance speech. This speech capped off an election in which Obama demonstrated inspirational leadership and the power to organize and take advantage of a true groundswell. Groundswell means, literally, a rise in the ocean. Figuratively, it typically refers to a political movement in which people come together around a common cause. Could there be any better example than this?

Through my.barackobama.com, through Facebook and MySpace and YouTube, and through clever outreach to his supporters, Obama's campaign has truly energized its fans and turned the power of their passion to spreading his messages and gaining the votes he needed. In this country balanced on the knife edge on so many issues, I think it is no exaggeration to say that Barack Obama owes his victory to the effectiveness of his campaign's groundswell Internet strategy.

What now?

Barack Obama faces perhaps the most complex set of problems to face a president in the last fifty years, from terrorism to a teetering economy to a deficit that scares the crap of out me for my children's future. He has the power to inspire people behind the solutions he may come up with. He's clearly intelligent. But does he have the humility to gather those solutions from the popular groundswell that elected him?"

McCain Faults Bush Response to Gulf Storm - New York Times

Who is going to win the race for presidency in US? The Democrats have to choose their candidate first. McCain has already secured his election as a candidate for the next president. But is he going to win? He is now distancing himself from George Bush.

McCain Faults Bush Response to Gulf Storm - New York Times: "Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared the handling of the disaster “terrible and disgraceful” and pledged that it would never happen again.

Senator John McCain, with his wife, Cindy, and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, spoke to reporters after a tour of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward on Thursday.

Mr. McCain ticked off a long list of mistakes by the current administration, saying there were “unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.”

Asked at a news conference outside St. David’s Catholic Church if he traced the failure of leadership straight to the top, Mr. McCain, who has said he wants to campaign with President Bush, said emphatically, “Yes.”

Presidential Hopefuls Spending Little On Web Ads. Why? Social Networking.

Presidential Hopefuls Spending Little On Web Ads. Why? Social Networking.: "Whether we talk about the general, all-encompassing social emporiums of MySpace and Facebook or more specific cloud-based gathering grounds among the likes of My.BarackObama.com, we can all recognize collectively that modern social frameworks on the Web are remarkably efficient platforms and means with/by which messages can be relayed.

Helge: How much are they really using the Web?


And if we are to take into account the reality that many millions of Americans are connected in one way or another to online networks - if one should look at the growth of social networks over the last few years, one can see quite clearly that a very significant percentage of Internet users in the U.S. are connected to a social framework of some sort - it then must come as little surprise that advertisement spending by the present set of presidential campaigns has been, well, exeedingly small. Especially given the very momentous circumstances we find ourselves in."

Helge: Are SM people going to have an impact?

The Tech of Obamamania: Online Phone Banks, Mass Texting and Blogs

The Tech of Obamamania: Online Phone Banks, Mass Texting and Blogs:

The use of technology like blogs, mass texting and online phone banks has been key to Sen. Barack Obama's surprise sweep of recent primaries.

The Illinois senator's campaign has been making use of a range of technologies -- from ringtones to SMS -- to inspire Obamamania. And it's working. Obama's recent parade of victories in the primaries has given him a slight lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"They've been using [texting] to get out the vote, which is incredibly smart because it gives people a way to take immediate political action," says Julie Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. "It's just what mobile technology is suited for."

The Illinois senator is not the only candidate whose campaign is using online technology and mobile phones, but his has been one of the most effective in its embrace of new tech strategies.

On Tuesday, for example, Obama supporters who signed up with the candidate received a text message reminding them to vote. The text message included a phone number to help them find their polling station, a key feature that helped get out the vote.

Other campaigns have experimented with texting, but haven't been as effective, Germany says. Last summer, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' campaign used text messaging to notify supporters of a televised speech. Germany, co-author of a study on the use of mobile phone technology in politics, says Edwards' campaign might as well as have used e-mail.

This week, the Obama campaign organized volunteers to make thousands of phone calls to get out the vote using an online phone-banking tool.

The technology helped the campaign target rival Hillary Clinton's base of Hispanic voters and female voters. The Obama campaign reports that volunteers made 5,000 calls in Spanish in Virginia alone, using its online Spanish phone-banking tool.

The tactic appears to have been successful. Initial exit polls on Tuesday evening showed that Obama won 54 percent of the Hispanic vote, a much bigger chunk than was expected of the electorate that up to now has mostly been voting for Clinton, according to inside-the-Beltway newspaper and website The Politico.

Obama Wins South Carolina Primary - New York Times

Obama Wins South Carolina Primary - New York Times: "COLUMBIA, S.C. — Senator Barack Obama won a commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, drawing a wide majority of black support and one-quarter of white voters in a contest that sets the stage for a multistate fight for the party’s presidential nomination.

In a bitter campaign here infused with discussions of race, Mr. Obama’s convincing victory puts him on equal footing with Mrs. Clinton — with two wins each in early-voting states — and gives him fresh momentum as the contest plunges into a nationwide battle over the next 10 days.

Former Senator John Edwards, a native of South Carolina who was trying to revive his candidacy, came in third place but vowed to keep his campaign alive, despite failing to win a single state so far.

With 99 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mr. Obama had 55 percent of the vote, Mrs. Clinton had 27 percent, and Mr. Edwards had 18 percent.

“Tonight, the cynics who believed that what began in the snows of Iowa was just an illusion were told a different story by the good people of South Carolina,” Mr. Obama told a euphoric crowd here after the results came in. “After four great contests in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time.”