Web 2.0 Meet Political Campaigns

Barack Obama has launched his own social network - MyBarackObama.com. Barack Obama is distancing himself from the crowd by building an online community of his own. End users are encouraged to profile themselves, blog about campaign events, plan events and attend the events of others within the community, etc. - basically, your regular old web 2.0 community. It will be interesting to see how the community itself grows, and if it will show any restraint during the time leading up to the Democratic primary or if it will turn into a fodder ground for the main election.

Hillary has been noticed poking around Yahoo! Answers, and Dean actually had a presence on MeetUp.com last go round. I haven't actually heard or seen much from potential republican candidates at this point, although I'm sure they are watching and learning. If MyBarackObama.com turns into a decent fund raising arm, I would expect the DNC and RNC to actually follow his lead heading into the '10 elections.

The downside of growing campaign involvement on the web are the privacy issues involved, especially for those americans who change parties over the years. Not that there's ever been much in terms of privacy protection for campaign participants, but the fact that it is so easy to profile individuals based on their online activity is a little bit unnerving. There are also plenty of politico's who will stoop pretty low to gain a political edge. Wikipedia at one point actually banned .gov addresses from editing the profiles of political figures because false edits were regularly being made from within the halls of congress - removing scandalous information and replacing it with things that would present a cleaner image of the candidates.

Privacy is a two-way street, though. It's much easier for the world at large to monitor the online activities of political leaders - the public has better technical resources. I expect at least two major slip-ups by campaign committees in the next two elections to hit the front pages of social network news sites. Whether or not those activities turn into real-world election changing results is still a question in my mind. The tech crowd loves a scandal, they love to point out the bad things "the man" is doing, and they love conspiracy theories, but I haven't yet seen much in the way of a voting army. It seems that all the people making noise are geographically disparate low numbered clusters.