I'm in a breakout session at the New Democratic Network's daylong conference on "New Tools, New Audiences," listening to Vijay Ravindran, the CTO of Catalist, talk about web 2.0 and its development of an "Enhanced Voter File." As usual, these are my rushed notes, and at best a good paraphrase of what was said, not direct quotation.

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for London, England, where I'll be speaking along with techPresident blogger Michael Turk at "Politics Web 2.0," a two-day international conference hosted by the University of London, Royal Halloway. The conference features 120 papers organised into 41 panels, with more than 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries, and is probably a bit more academic than most of the events I tend to go to these days. My talk is titled, "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America." What do you think I should cover?

Watching the Obama campaign message, "Yes we can," morph into a music video and then once again into a user-generated participatory project is to see the beginnings of Web Politics 2.0.

I say it over and over and over again:

The Republican Party lost the Majority in both the House and Senate by a mere 82,000 votes spread out through key races throughout the country. That's it.

Most races in the House were lost by less than 1 percent - Rob Simmons in CT by less than 100 votes. George Allen, a one-time likely Presidential candidate, lost his Senate seat because he failed to grasp the importance of the modern world and faced a swarm of well-coordinated attacks from the Left.

The fact of the matter is that we're no longer talking about millions or even thousands of votes that decide an election - but handfuls. And the only way to tap the "Long Tail" of politics is through Web 2.0.

Let's dig in...

How much should lower-level political candidates try to adopt the multi-faceted internet strategies of the presidential campaigns?