It’s the network, stupid

I'm attaching a short piece from the MIT's Technology Review entitled "How Obama Really Did It".  The piece explores the Obama campaign's phenomenal success with their web and online strategy, which apparently promoted Clinton advisor James Carville, of the famed "it's the economy, stupid", to paraphrase his own quip with the network now as his focus...

A few interesting hints from the article:

The Obama team put such technologies (Web 2, collaboration etc) at the centre of its campaign

The campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance beween top-down control and anarchy

They made giving money a social event...

You have to make the web tools central to the campaign and properly manage the networks of supporters they help organise

I get Obama's tex messages (says David All, a Republican media consultant)...it is never pointless, it is always woth reading and it has an action for you to take.

The piece claims we'll never see political campaigning the same again.  That might be true but the more interesting question for me is how Obama and his team, if they lay claim to the White House in November, translate the campaigning impact of the network approach into the same kind of shift in the way we do politics and policy.

Footnote - I watched the Obama acceptance speech from the Democratic Convention on YouTube last night.  The speech lasts about 45 minutes and had been watched by almost 300,000 people (that's in less than 2 days).  And remember you don't register a YouTube 'hit' as I understand it unless you watch the full clip...