Shortly after 3 AM on the east coast, the long-awaited text message from Barack Obama announcing Joe Biden had finally arrived. But it was something short of letting the cat out of the bag. At 10:50 pm on Friday night, ABC News confirmed that Biden was getting Secret Service protection. The first official confirmation that I could find came from CNN at 12:45 a.m. The promised "be the first to know" text message came a full two hours later.

The common wisdom is that BarackObama.com is not only better at wrangling donations from the faithful, but is categorically better than JohnMcCain.com because it embraces an interactive as opposed to a broadcast model.

But let's not kid ourselves. At its core, BarackObama.com is not truly interactive. It is transactional.

There's a lot of hype surrounding microtargeting -- which is the process of targeting voters scientifically based on consumer and demographic data. This piece in Salon yesterday on "Obama's super marketing machine" is no different. But as someone with a bit more than a passing understanding of what microtargeting is, I have to shake my head a little at articles like this. Because the media gets it almost completely wrong -- whether it's hyping relatively mundane technologies or celebrating "sexy" examples (dial up 40 year old Vodka drinking Volvo drivers!) that have almost no bearing on microtargeting's usefulness in real life. 

But this development is more properly seen as a natural evolution in any open, networked system that is allowed to operate in the political space. The credit belongs to his supporters, not Obama.

It's now a truism that when presented with an open platform, users will hack it to serve their purposes, not necessarily those of the sponsor. Many times, those two sets of priorities are intertwined (e.g. supporters desire to get involved matched with a campaign's need for volunteers), though in this case, they weren't.

My.BarackObama.com still works, and it's not because recreated the features of a social network. If they've succeeded, it's because they've harkened back to the early days of the web, to the primary way that the online grassroots connected with each other before blogs: e-mail groups.

To get the most bang for its online buck, the McCain campaign should be the first political campaign in history to release a website API.

Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.

The use of Twitter as a discovery vehicle for raw political intelligence takes another step today with Election Journal, a project by Republican election watchdog Mike Roman. The site is using Twitter, Flickr, and Google Maps to cover primary election day in Philadelphia, with Twittering correspondents stationed around the city.

Hillary Clinton's MyPA won't change the way the campaign spends money in Pennyslvania, but it's a neat idea nonetheless.

As fundraising gets more and more transparent, it's important to learn how to read between the lines. As pathbreaking as the Obama campaign has been, they are a step back from the transparency of the Dean bat, which at least gave us real dollar figures in addition to a total number of donors. Neither could beat the transparency gold standard set by Ron Paul, who updated via a real-time XML+Flash element that was scraped for analytics. Moreover, when the Paul campaign bulk uploaded offline contributions, they told people. The Obama "bat" turns out to be an indecipherable mix of real and fake data.