On Wednesday (June 11), I joined a panel of eCampaign Directors for major presidential campaigns at a forum called, what else, the first 21st Century Campaign, sponsored by Google and National Journal. Peter Dauo for Senator Clinton, Mark Soohoo for Senator McCain, Joe Rospars for Senator Obama, and me, former Director of eStrategy for Governor Romney’s presidential campaign, rounded out the panel.

We discussed topics such as what it’s like to run Internet strategy for a major presidential campaign, the changing role of traditional media, what factors into a candidate’s success on the Internet, and whether the guerrilla tactics employed during the campaign will carry over to the White House for the candidate who is elected.

Think MTV's Street Team '08 once again puts MTV News at the leading edge of election news coverage. I have long been a fan of MTV News and its coverage of electoral politics. Back in the early '90's, while I was researching presidential use of television to manipulate public opinion for my dissertation, I was an avid viewer of MTV News. Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren were doing some really edgy stuff, from gathering college students into a Boston University auditorium to measure their real-time reactions to the presidential debates, to Tabitha Soren interviewing George H.W. Bush on the back platform of a moving train the Sunday before election day (who could forget Poppy referring to "MTV afficionados," showing how completely disconnected he was from young voters?), MTV offered a new breed of television news.

And that tradition continues on today, as MTV News migrates most of its news programming online, including the beta site Think MTV. Think MTV's foray into election news coverage is an ambitious project called Street Team '08. MTV has recruited and hired 51 amateur journalists to blog about the election. 51, as in one for every state plus one for DC. Supervising Producer of Street Team '08 Michael Scogin talks more about the project here: