To a web designer, IA stands for Information Architect. To a busload of Obama campaigners bound for swing states, IA meant Iowa. Thankfully, Scott Thomas, the former Design Director for the Obama election web site, was on hand to bridge that gap in the months leading up to last November 4th.

Within a week of polling day, Thomas had boarded a plane for Japan, to rest his eyes from screen diagrams, escape from the 24-7 network news treadmill and spouting election coverage. Little did he realize he'd stepped right into a country where the leading cigarette brand is called Hope and every storefront was plastered with billposters of domestic electoral candidates, with way worse graphics than those he'd overseen back home.

Last week, Thomas, who is launching a new book project, Designing Obama, presented to the Interaction Design graduate students at the School of Visual Arts here in New York city, not just to share his vacation photos of Tokyo, but to share lessons from the preceding months designing and endlessly refining what showed up on browsers for Barack.

Joe Rospars might seem like a household name in the households occupied by those of us who hang around these parts. But Google the name of the Obama campaign's new media director -- as Rospars himself claims never to do, in this solid new National Journal profile by Amy Harder -- and you turn up just 30,000 hits. Compare that to David Plouffe, who, despite never ascending to Karl Rove or Joe Trippi-like levels of campaign manager fame, still returns ten time the Google results as Rospars.

Rospars, by intention, remained a force largely behind the scenes during the presidential run, despite architecting the very way millions of Americans engaged with the Obama campaign. Writes Harder:

Every campaign needs a "cast of characters" supporters can connect to, Rospars says. Obama, Michelle Obama and Joe Biden starred. [Sam] Graham-Felsen spoke to supporters every day through his blog. Some supporters' e-mail inboxes were filled with more messages from Plouffe than from their own families. But Rospars was most instrumental by being least overtly involved. His voice was loudest when the voices of others were heard. He's the invisible host responsible for making conversation easy.

Despite the novelty of being a new media guru, Rospars did many of the very traditional things a good manager does: build a exceptional team, set a clear and strong vision, and then fight for the resources necessary to get the job done.

The profile also provides some insights into why Rospars didn't follow many of his campaign colleagues to the White House:

Rospars admits to being only "vaguely interested in how to make government more transparent. It's not where my heart and passion is." But he's still rooting for the conversation between Obama and his supporters -- a conversation Rospars himself helped enable -- to continue. "I have a somewhat personal emotional investment in the relationship," Rospars said. His firm advises Organizing for America and Rospars wants to help cultivate the network, albeit not to the extent that he did during the campaign. "The relationships didn't end on Election Day," Rospars said. "We built those relationships in a way that it was never really about Election Day or a candidate. It was about a common sense of purpose and what the people wanted the country to be."

The full profile is well worth a read, and you can find it here. Also check out Ari Melber's own reflections on the piece and its subject.

The Washington Post is out tonight with the really big numbers on the Obama campaign's success online. And email is still the killer app.

In January, not only will we have the first African American President, but we have the first "Tech President" as has been said many times before on this blog.

With that, there are a lot of questions being discussed at Obama HQ, in the transition, on this blog, and all over the tubes – what to do with Obama's list? What to do with BarackObama.com? What to do with WhiteHouse.gov? Will President Obama use the internet to make government more transparent (I bet former Blue State Digital partner Clay Johnson and the Sunlight Foundation have a few ideas on that), and how can the President-Elect use all this to be a better President? And many more questions.

Here are two words that have yet to be uttered from the stage of the Democratic National Convention: BarackObama.com or Democrats.org. I've slogged through the posted transcripts of the first three days speeches in Denver, and using the "find" tool on Firefox could not find one occurrence of either phrase. This is more than a minor slip by Team Obam, in my humble opinion.

Recently, Sen. Chris Dodd's presidential campaign announced the creation of a "social network aggregation" site - one that ostensibly would allow a visitor to browse Dodd's presence on all social networks at once. Using MyLifeBrand, an alpha-stage social network aggregator tool, the team put together a page which is available here. While Read/Write Web is overall positive on the value proposition of MyLifeBrand, Matt Safford of Appscout directs some well-founded criticism at Dodd's implementation..

Today, Comscore released a new report comparing the websites of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As intuition may lead you, Senator Obama fares very well in this study. Here are some of the key statistics that jumped out at me.

• HillaryClinton.com's audience of unique visitors dropped from 313,000 in January to 206,000 in February, a 34 percent drop.
• BarackObama.com's audience of unique visitors grew from 297,000 in January to 376,000 in February, a 27 percent uptick.

Detailing what he thought was a bug at BarackObama.com, Michael Arrington found it odd that the site listed the "Gay Nigger Association of America for Barack Obama" as a supporter. Some quick digging turned up an error alright. The system automatically displayed the latest group created, whether it was actually supportive or not.

The bug ended up being the openness of the system.

It's 9:16 AM in Boston and I just visited BarackObama.com to check on the time of his live webstream. It's at 10:50 AM EST, but even more interesting is his new website.

Lot's to see here and explore before the announcement. The first thing you notice is the campaign's logo. It's the letter O in blue with red and white stripes at the bottom. There are menu options for Learn, Issues, Get Involved, Blog, Newsroom and Donate. You've also got In the News and an Obama Store.

There's a section called My.BarackObama.com which is subtitled, "This Campaign is About You" and has options to Create a Profile, Find Supporters Near You, Plan and Attend Events, Network, Become a Fundraiser, Write a Blog. There's also an Upcoming Events section.

On the far right is BarackTV. Clicking on that brings you to a page with an embedded Brightcove video player. There's a large video on the left with a listing of five videos on the right. When I play the video is smooth with no stuttering. You can also increase the size and make it bigger. I don't see any way to subscribe though to be notified of new videos.

I'd like to spend more time exploring all the features of the site, but right now I'm going to take a closer look at the buttons at the bottom of the page.