Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton is the first time an insurgent has beaten the establishment candidate in the Democratic primaries since Jimmy Carter in 1976. This is interesting and important for all kinds of reasons. One, as I've written before, is that it suggests that the era of Big Money and Big Media pre-selecting the nominee of the Democratic party may well be over, in no small part because of the affordances brought by the internet: lower costs of communication and collaboration, and less allowances for hypocrisy and dishonesty in campaigns.

But there's another big reason why Obama's victory is so important. He is riding herd on the largest and most potent new political organization anyone has seen on the American landscape in at least sixteen years. He's probably got anywhere from four to eight million email addresses on top of his 1.5 million donors and 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking site.

What happens with this organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? For a website that is focused on how the candidates are using the web, and the web is using them, by the time November rolls around, this could be the billion-dollar question.

This isn't the first time this question has arisen in modern American politics, by the way. And usually the answer is "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss." It's just that the internet should force us to think about the possibilities of a different answer. Not only that, I think Obama is thinking about a different answer.

More reporting from the front lines of academic research on politics and the internet: Now I'm sitting in on a panel with presentations on the connections between the Dean campaign and the New Left (no, he didn't slum with the Weathermen); John Kerry's innovative (!) use of the web post-2004; and Italian firebrand and antipolitician extraordinaire, Beppe Grillo.

Glenn Greenwald gives respect to Ron Paul and considers a comparison with Howard Dean; Danny Glover makes another comparison, this time to Ross Perot, warning that Paul may started getting similarly hounded in the press; Fred Thompson suggests that he won't be president after all; blogger Craig Stoltz gets excited over the New York Times' Debate Analyzer; a new section of Fred Thompson's website seems strangely underdone; and Mitt Romney ads are showing up on Gay.com. Way!

Ron Paul is in the internet's sweet spot for politics. That is, he is an remark-able candidate with a clear message that the mainstream media has been ignoring. The net reacts to censorship by routing around it; in the case of politics, the net reacts to mainstream silence or disrespect by creating or using new media systems to spread a message that people find compelling. The 2008 election just got a whole lot more interesting.

Newt Gingrich is advising Fred Thompson to use video when, or if, he announces; asking if the Internet really matters in election politics; Barack Obama launches Generation Obama; and Obama, Sam Brownback, and Ron Paul are the only candidates to support an act that would create "a kind of Google for the federal government";

When Howard Dean “friended” Micah Sifry on Facebook, Micah announced his skepticism about the meaning of this relationship: “What kind of “meeting” is taking place here, between a famous person’s Facebook profile and college students?”

With all due respect, I think Micah’s question falls into the linguistic trap of whether social network “friends” really are your friends. If we set aside our notions of authenticity (that’s often a useful thing to do, anyways) we’ll see that what’s happening here is the establishment of a new channel of communication between a citizen and a political leader - nothing more or less. And that’s quite a lot.

Howard Dean on "the most extraordinary invention for empowering ordinary people since the invention of the printing press: ....speaking for myself, even after the campaign four years ago, I didn't realize what a powerful tool this is.....It has re-democratized America. There is an enormous shift in power." More after the jump...

The bigfoots of the press were all in Chicago this past weekend for YearlyKos, and they churned out lots of coverage. So did the littlefoots of the web. Plus, Ron Paul beats Barack Obama on YouTube!

I’m in Chicago for the second annual YearlyKos convention and since yesterday afternoon I’ve keep coming back to the same conclusion: I think, nearly three-and-a-half years after Dean for America collapsed in the wake of the Iowa caucus loss, that Howard Dean might have won the campaign.

Howard Dean gave the one of the first keynotes tonight and it was very, very impressive.