Senator Obama is not only be one of the first black candidates. He is also the first US presidential contender young enough to have ‘come of age’ in the world of the Internet. Is he the going to be the ‘JFK of the Net’ ?
Cyberspace has been pleading with the charismatic Democratic Senator from Illinois for quite some time. This relatively inexperienced senator acquired quite a following on the Internet and in the blogosphere in 2006. DraftObama.org, a grassroots organization supporting a presidential run by Senator Barack Obama, is spearheaded by a growing collection of volunteers from around the country. The movement has quickly grown from a single Web page created by a computer technician in Maryland to a national organization with thousands of petition signers and hundreds of volunteers in every state and the District of Columbia. As a new Senator, in late 2005, he began podcasting from his U.S. Senate official Web site and he raised a significant amount of money for other candidates online through MoveOn and other like sites. Like most other politicians considering a 2008 presidential run, he is making use of Web 2.0 to communicate in new ways with the American electorate. He has a relatively big presence already on a number of social networking sites including MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. Read more: A New York Times article | |