Online tools will revolutionize campaigns

Webb: I've always been interested in how technology is changing our lives, including politics. With Frank out of town for several days, I get this column all to myself. So it seems a good time for a change of pace from my usual partisan spin.

We're all familiar with the spectacular dot-com bust of a few years ago. The Web was supposed to change the way we work, play, learn and do most anything, and then all those Internet businesses went poof and the stock market took a dive.

Well, the crash wasn't the fault of the Internet. There's an old, but true, saying that we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run but underestimate it in the long run.

Technology has been hurtling forward, ever faster, and anyone who isn't staying up to speed on the latest tools for business or politics won't be successful for long.

"The 2008 election will be the first national contest waged and won primarily online, said Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean's presidential campaign, in a recent Wired Magazine article. "The Web puts us over the tipping point; it's democracy's killer app."

I agree with Trippi. Today, the applications available online facilitate every aspect of a campaign: fund raising (John Kerry

raised more than $80 million online), communications (in a wide variety of ways), rapid response to criticism, grassroots organizing, scheduling, managing volunteers, highly sophisticated voter targeting, get-out-the-vote, even walking neighborhoods and doing literature drops (with geo-coded maps showing likely voters).

The Web and related online tools are revolutionizing every aspect of political campaigns. And the transformation will only accelerate with ubiquitous broadband, increasing wireless capabilities, instant messaging, mass media convergence, the blogging phenomenon, and so forth.

MoveOn.org grew out of nowhere to become an enormously powerful force for liberal politics. It changed the face of fund raising and reinvented grassroots activism. With an e-mail list of several million people, MoveOn.org was able to raise millions of dollars (average contribution of $50) with a few keystrokes, pumping more than $40 million into the election, according to Wired Magazine. And we're only seeing the beginning. With the kind of broadband capacity being deployed by iProvo and UTOPIA, every Web site becomes a potential full-motion video broadcast station and every computer becomes a potential receiver of full-motion video from millions of Web site transmitters. That changes everything.

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.