Here are my notes for the talk I'm about to give at Politics Web 2.0 on "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America.” (Caveat emptor, your experience may vary.)

Guess what? Close academic study of the presidential candidates reveals that the Democrats' site provided more information and participation opportunities, and were more professionally designed, than the Republicans'. OK, not a big surprise. More interesting and challenging: a report on how the Obama campaign in NY coped (badly) with communication overload in the weeks before the primary.

Here are my notes on a very interesting talk by Rachel Gibson of the University of Manchester, titled "Trickle-up Politics? The Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on citizen participation." I think you'll find her overview and characterizations of politics before and during the web to be very helpful.

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.

Micah Sifry is busy covering the session focused almost entirely on the 2004 Dean campaign, so I decided to pop into a session focused, at least in theory, on analyses of practical applications of technology.

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon explored the ways in which web sites - primarily blogs in her analysis - draw an audience and gain importance. In addition, Jonah Bossewitch examines the Zyprexa Kills campaign as an example of citizens using the Internet to distribute information.

Session 1 of the Politics: Web 2.0 Conference brings us to an examination of Facebook and clustering of ideological types and research done by Brian Gaines and Jeff Mondak at the University of Illinois. One of the fears about the growing rise of the Internet is it fosters a cognitive dissonance and allows individuals to ignore information with which they disagree. It also allows them to congregate together with only those who align with their views and self-reinforce.

Gaines and Mondak looked at whether friend networks had commonality of belief systems or whether there were significant variations. One interesting aspect they explored was whether the urge to add more friends - ths raising their social capital - would lead people to connecting with more divergent networks and therefore exposing themselves to more diverse opinions.