Worth considering:
Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign, but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.
The panelists also note how mainstream media tends to fail in politics, simply reporting on what each candidate says without saying who’s right or wrong. The blogosphere, they say (particularly Trippi and Huffington), tends to call out factual inaccuracies better than mainstream media.
Howard Dean showed that the Internet could be used to raise lots of money online, say the panelists. But Newsome says social networking is significantly more powerful and allows for the creation of much more meaningful connections between the candidate and voters. “I’m addicted to Facebook,” he said.