Here are some specific tools being used in campaigns now and in the future. Politicians must learn to use these tools or be left behind.

• Full-featured Web sites (not just online brochures) used for every aspect of the campaign. With many tools of campaign management, organization, communications, fund raising, etc., built into the Web sites, they really become the nerve center of a campaign.

• E-mail campaign newsletters and alerts. For the first time, these tools were used effectively by many campaigns in 2004. Some were rudimentary, but others were quite sophisticated, and we'll see a lot more in the future. These tools allow candidates to communicate directly to opinion leaders and voters without being filtered by the news media. Once set up, they are cheap and easy to use. A variation on the newsletter is viral e-postcard distribution over e-mail. It might come down to this in the future: He who has the best e-mail list wins.

• Grassroots meeting coordination: These tools can be built into Web sites. Meetup.com< facilitates thousands of local meetings every week. Meetup.com currently lists 892 John Kerry Meetup Groups around the country with 129,172 members. Social networking: Sites like Friendster.com and LinkedIn.com allow individuals or candidates to network and develop lists of connected contacts. Tools are available for creating and distributing petitions and surveys.

• Sophisticated data warehousing and data mining tools for targeting voters in a variety of ways. All sorts of public and private data are loaded into the warehouse, which can be queried and quickly spit out whatever lists and information are wanted. If you want a list, for example, of 30- to 50-year-olds who live in affluent ZIP codes in the 2nd Congressional District who voted in the last two elections, who have professional licenses (doctor, lawyer, etc.), who contributed $50 or more to a political campaign, who are registered Democrats, who attended their political party caucus, you can get it.

• Automated voice broadcasts. You can go to a Web site and in 10 minutes set up and schedule a voice broadcast to 500 or 500,000 households (you choose whom you want to call). Then you pick up the phone, call a number and record your message. It's delivered 10 minutes later or whenever you schedule it. It's simple, easy and inexpensive.