David Talbot, in our cover story ("How Obama Really Did It"), reports that the Web has forever changed electoral politics--and one candidate was quicker to see this than others. "Barack Obama, more than Hillary ­Clinton and far more than John McCain, made new-media platforms and his own social-networking site fulcra of his campaign," says Talbot, who found the backbone of the Obama camp's Web strategy in the Boston offices of Blue State Digital, the firm that manages the accounts of more than a million members of Obama's social network. "It seems that the ward heelers of another age--going door to door and driving old ladies to the polls--have been re­incarnated as geeks who adapt server resources, send out targeted e-mail and text-messaging blasts, and chop up phone-bank lists for thousands of supporters to handle at their home computers."

Winner of the Overseas Press Club award for International Environmental Reporting, Talbot is Technology Review's chief correspondent.