Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The Democrat's new online tool allows supporters to reach out to individual voters in their neighborhood.
By David Talbot
Barack Obama's campaign used online social networking
very effectively to raise money and organize supporters to win the
Democratic primary. These days, John McCain's site is beefing up similar
features, such as McCain Nation, which
allows supporters to easily organize and find campaign events in their area.
But the Obama camp recently upped the ante with a neighbor-to-neighbor tool. It aims
to send supporters out to contact individual voters in their neighborhoods--presumably
drawn from databases of current or former Democrats--and follow an
Obama-provided script to ensure that the faithful get out and vote. The tool
"might be a sign that not only is team Obama ahead in terms of the
participatory Web, but that it has figured out how to use what they've learned
online thus far to actually win votes," Andrew Raseij, founder of Personal
Democracy Forum, a conference and website about politics
and technology, wrote me in an e-mail.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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