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.

(This story was originally published on AlterNet and is crossposted with the permission of the excellent folks over there. -- Nancy)

As an organizing tool, Facebook has had a couple of ugly weeks of late. Students at Michigan State University recently used Facebook to revive Cedar Fest, an old campus tradition that had been outlawed by local officials in the late 1980s after it frequently escalated from a party into something more akin to a riot. This time around, after violence ensued, East Lansing police officials vowed to hold those Facebook users accountable. News headlines ran along the lines of "Facebook: Tool for Chaos?" and the social-networking site was demonized as a means for the rabble to wreak havoc. But it's only right to hold up the recent commotion in south-central Michigan against other Facebook-fueled collective action. Facebook is revolutionizing the way collective political and social actions are organized today, blowing the doors off old models of how volunteer lists are amassed, funds raised, and messages honed and delivered.

At last week's New Organizing Institute/IPDI-sponsored Google presentation on advocacy tools, after looking at Google Ads and answering questions about click fraud, the company's Elections and Issue Advocacy team touched on a new tool whose potential political significance jumped out at me. More than a year ago, Google snapped up a company that was developing an online interface for buying radio advertising, and despite some skepticism about its usefulness, the product looks to be moving out of beta fairly soon.

You can get a good overview of how the ordering system will work here; note that you can specify stations by location and genre, set your own budget, choose your time of day to run ads and get some reporting after-the-fact. You upload your own ads as mp3s, though the site will help you find a company to build them if necessary. Groovy! Basically, you can run ads across the country from a single interface — you won't need to work with different ad reps for individual stations or chains of stations. With 1600 AM and FM stations in the network, and the top 10 stations in 24 of the 25 biggest media markets in the country, Google claims the potential to reach essentially 100% of the U.S. population.