While I usually cover only the mobile stuff for Personal Democracy and TechPresident I happened to be one of the few PDF/TechPresident bloggers at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco last week. While I was there launching my own company, I came across Politics4All.com while walking around the Demo Pit area on day two of the event.

Several new projects point to the idea that politicos are coming to understand how much social networks matter in 2008; the world's most famous customer service representative jumps into the wired POTUS debate; the DNC wants to preemptively paint the Republican vice presidential candidate as the next Dick Cheney; the #dontgo uprising enters a second week, and we consider whether this hashtag is becoming a full-fledged movement; and so much more it would take require calling Congress back into session to discuss it all properly.

When it comes to social media, I'm a digital native. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter - these services are deeply integrated into my daily life and, to a certain extent, the lives of my friends and family. The fact that I am a native makes me well-suited to explain the technology and its uses and benefit; the cost, of course, is losing the non-native perspective.

After watching the Iowa returns and reading blog and press accounts, I'm starting to see a potential third way for social network technology. Caveat, I don't have ethnography to back this up, this is just my opinion, but I think there's something here. The old model of social network sites and campaigns proposes that some uber-tool, say a great Facebook app, leverages all sorts of information and eventually gets out the vote or raises funds. That is, the end goals of the electoral process can be attacked programatically, that all problems are solvable with enough data. A nice idea, but not true. Facebook's Beacon and Social Ads are insightful here; even with unlimited data and great programming, machines attempting to "socially" influence fall short; the algorithms and points of interaction just aren't human enough. I don't want to join Blockbuster just because I'm served ads with the face of some guy I've met a few times, and I probably won't switch my vote just because a candidate is spamming my newsfeed.

Buyers of political books on Amazon are clearly divided between people who favor liberal titles vs people who favor conservative titles, with little cross-buying occurring. But a new study of consumer behavior suggests that so-called "influentials" may not matter as much as everyone thinks, and the malleability and gullibility of voters who are easily influenced by others is the more important factor.

This is the Mark Cuban theory applied to online politics. Read on.

So, this afternoon I got an email reading, "Howard Dean sent you a message on Facebook." (This is after I decided to accept his friend invitation yesterday.) Well, it wasn't really from Dean. What I did get was an email from the person who is paid to "be" Howard Dean on Facebook, or rather, one of the staffers behind his profile, Stephanie Taylor, the managing editor of Democrats.org. I wish I could say I was disappointed to not hear directly from the Governor, but this is what I expected. Let's parse what she wrote...

The Obama campaign has just launched its Eons campaign, including a big ad on the Eons homepage rotation. For those of you unfamiliar with Eons, it is a social network for people ages 50 and up (I had to lie about my age to join, heheh), founded by Monster.com's founder Jeff Taylor. While many think of social networks as online communities filled with youngsters, Eons clearly breaks the mold. Offering the same type of networking tools and opportunities as MySpace and Facebook, Eons is clearly not your kid's Oldsmobile (does Oldsmobile even exist anymore? Yes, I know it does, but do you remember the last Oldsmobile commercial you saw?).

This morning I attended the Adfero Group's Winning in a Web World forum at the US Chamber of Commerce. The topic of this forum was "How Associations Engage Online in a Presidential Election." The half-day forum started out with a panel on User Generated Campaigns, featuring among others one of our newest TechPresident colleagues, Patrick Ruffini. Patrick was joined by David Almacy, who used to serve as the Internet and eCommunications Director for the White House and is now a digital media strategy consultant. The second panel featured e-advocacy strategists from AARP, Children's Defense Fund, and Strong Schools for America to talk about how they were leveraging the campaigns to raise awareness of their issues.

[This morning, danah boyd gave a great presentation on how politicians are failing to understand the social dynamics of online social networks. She's posted the "rough unedited crib of the actual talk" on her website, and we're pleased that she's given us permission to post it here as well. The editors.]

Think about the publics that you know, the publics where politics occur. Gatherings like this... conference halls, shopping malls, political rallies, etc. How do politics take place in these spaces? Obviously, speeches are a part of it, but there's more that happens in these publics. At the very simplest level, there's a lot of shaking hands with everyday people. Ideally, there's a lot of listening to people's stories... Always, there's presence. Presence has been a critical component of political discourse because it allows people to connect to and relate with politicians. Through shared presence, politicians are made "real."