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TechPresident was started by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry as a group blog that watches how political campaigns use the web, and vice versa, how voters and activists are also using it to affect campaigns. On PersonalDemocracy.com, we're tracking how technology is opening up governance and making it more transparent, interactive, and efficient, as well as how all kinds of civic engagement are being transformed. On techPresident.com you'll find charts tracking the social media around campaigns, while on PersonalDemocracy.com you'll find in-depth coverage of how political practitioners are developing best practices in online fundraising, advertising, use of mobile tools and video, general web strategy and the latest fun widgets and gadgets.

Our team of bloggers is made of veterans of the 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections, ranging across the political spectrum. Their expertise covers everything from website design to the latest in mobile tools and social networking sites. And we'll look closely not just at what the campaigns are or are not doing, but what voters and activists are doing online to independently affect the election.

In addition to the Personal Democracy Forum editorial staff (Editor Micah Sifry and Associate Editor Nancy Scola) the contributors to TechPresident.com include:

Contributing Editors

Morra Aarons, Internet communications consultant, former Director of Internet Marketing for the Democratic National Committee and Kerry-Edwards '04; political director of BlogHer.org. You can visit her at www.womenandwork.org..

David All, former communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston and former communications director for 2006 Senate candidate Mike Bouchard and owner of the David All Group.

Michael Bassik, VP of MSHC, expert on online political advertising.

Michael Cornfield a political scientist, studies and advises on campaign politics, the public discourse, and the internet. He is the author of Politics Moves Online: Campaigning and the Internet and The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values, co-edited with David M. Anderson. Cornfield currently serves as a Senior Research Consultant to the Pew Internet & American Life Project and is an Adjunct Professor at The Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) of The George Washington University.

Christian Crumlish is a writer and consultant based in Oakland, California. His most recent book is The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Business Politics, and Everyday Life and he blogs primarily at xian's monolog.

Chuck DeFeo, General Manager for Interactiev and Social Media for Washington Times, previously General Manager of Townhall.com.

Colin Delany, online communications consultant and web designer since 1997. Previously Online Communications Manager at the National Environmental Trust, writing at epolitics.com.

Philip de Vellis , viral video producer and Senior VP of New Media at Murphy Putnam Media.

Zack Exley, Director of Online Organizing and Communications, Kerry/Edwards '04.

Mindy Finn, director of Finn Enterprises, former director of e-Strategy for Mitt Romney '08, former Director of New Media & Technology for Rick Santorum, former RNC eCampaign Deputy Director, and former Deputy Webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04.

Jan Frel is a former editor for TomPaine.com and AlterNet.org. He has also worked on Howard Dean's presidential campaign in Vermont. Jan was raised in Southern California and he studied Geography at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He currently lives in San Francisco, California.

Steve Garfield, Video-blogging pioneer

Matt Browner Hamlin, Writer and political consultant. He was the Deputy Internet Director on Chris Dodd's Presidential campaign. Before moving to work in American politics full-time, he worked for Students for a Free Tibet and helped turn the SFT Blog into the 21st Most Powerful Blog in the World.

Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, FastCompany.com

Kate Kaye is a freelance writer who has been covering online advertising, media and emerging technologies for various trade publications since 2000. Kate?s work has been published in Advertising Age, Business 2.0, AdAge's Creativity, Revolution Magazine, various MediaPost publications, and others. In 2001, Kate self-published Sales Pitch Society, an essay documenting and exploring the dangers of engineered viral and peer-to-peer marketing tactics, and since 2000, Kate has written and published her irreverent commentary column, The Lowbrow Lowdown, aiming to analyze the effects of marketing and advertising on culture, society and our daily lives. Most recently, Kate wrote and designed a kooky self-published punk rock-themed cookie cookbook entitled, The Punk Rock Kitchen Presents Cookie Chaos!

Mike Krempasky is the political director for American Target
Advertising, a conservative direct mail firm, founded by conservative
activist pioneer Richard Viguerie. He co-founded RedState.org,
Rathergate.com, and NotSpecter.com. He would have tolerated a Kerry
presidency in exchange for a Steelers Super Bowl win.

Dan Manatt , Political Web Video professional since 1999 and Executive Producer and founder of PoliticsTV.com and CapNews.Net, a web video news service that covers the U.S. Congress.

Jack McEnany Editor at LostNation.TV

Ari Melber is a regular contributor to The Nation Online and The Huffington Post, and his commentary has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Forward, The Times Union, Alternet.org and The American Prospect Online. He has reviewed nonfiction books for The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews and The Stranger, and is also a contributor to "MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country," a bestselling book about political activism (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004).

Melber has served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the John Kerry Presidential Campaign. He spoke at the 2006 YearlyKos convention on a panel about foreign policy and netroots activism, and he volunteers as a guest lecturer for the Close Up Foundation, a nonpartisan civics education organization. Melber has appeared as a commentator on several talk radio shows, from Westwood One's conservative "Scarborough Country" to the liberal "Young Turks" program on Sirius Radio. Melber received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and he also studied at the University of Chile in Santiago. He was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. He can be contacted at amelber(at)hotmail.com

Jed Miller is Internet director for the Revenue Watch Institute, which promotes transparency and responsible resource management in oil, gas and mining. He is also a lecturer on new media at Columbia's School of International Public Affairs. Previously, he oversaw strategy and publishing for ACLU.org and launched the ACLU's blog and multimedia initiatives. From 1998 to 2001 he managed reader forums at NYTimes.com and also created the web discussions for the 2000 series on race in America. He has written and consulted for non-profits and foundations including AmericaSpeaks, The New York Times Company Foundation, and Global Kids, Inc., among others. His personal web site is www.jedmiller.com.

Kathy Mitchell manages online advocacy for Consumers Union, nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports and helps other nonprofits develop their web advocacy on a volunteer basis. She now writes regularly about the practical problems faced by nonprofit advocates trying to reach an audience on the Internet on her new personal blog gettingthemessageout.blogspot.com.

Luigi Montanez, Web developer and consultant for Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. While working at Democracy for America in 2005, he built DFA-Link, one of the first social activism networks on the Web. He now works with WebStrong Group, and specializes in Ruby on Rails development and Salesforce.com implementations.

Chris Nolan is a stand-alone journalist who runs "Politics From Left to Right," a San Francisco-based political site that focuses on the intersection of politics and technology and the differences between East Coast insiders and West Coast influencers.

Justin Oberman, MOpocket.com, expert on mobile phone use in politics

Spencer Overton, George Washington University law professor, co-founder of blackprof.com, author of Stealing Democracy, and former member of DNC Presidential Nomination Scheduling Commission

Chris Rabb, Publisher, Afro-Netizen

Brian Reich is the editor of Campaign Web Review, a blog examining the use of the Internet by candidates, campaigns and organizations, activists and the media during the 2004 cycle. He was credentialed to blog the Democratic and Republican Conventions as well as the Presidential Debates. He has spent much of his life working with campaigns and political organizations, helping to direct dozens of campaigns across the country. He also served as Vice President Gore's Briefing Director in the White House and during the 2000 campaign. Brian is now a strategic consultant and Director of Boston Operations for Mindshare Interactive Campaigns.

Alan Rosenblatt, Associate Director of Online Advocacy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Executive Director of the Internet Advocacy Center

Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee, webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04, and former Giuliani '08 advisor

Tracy Russo, President of Russo Strategies, an online communications and strategy firm; former Chief Blogger and Deputy Online Communications Director for the John Edwards campaign and former director of Online Outreach for the Democratic National Committee.

Liza Sabater, Publisher, CultureKitchen

>Nancy Scola, former internet organizer with Mark Warner's 2008 presidential campaign

Ruby Sinreich, expert on network-centric advocacy

Fred Stutzman, Ph.D. student and social networks researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science.

Michael Tate, sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, Communications Director for Penn College Republicans, former Director of Online Communications for Tom Tancredo '08.

Zephyr Teachout, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Duke Law School, former Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean and former National Director of the Sunlight Foundation.

Mike Turk, former e-campaign director of the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney 2004

David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He was Senior Internet Advisor to the Dean campaign. He has written for a wide range of publications about the intersection of technology, ideas and values; he is a senior editor at Worthwhile Magazine and a columnist for KMWorld. He is currently a fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His main blog is Joho. He has not appeared on Oprah.

Michael Whitney, progressive Internet strategist and web producer.

Advisory Board

Cory Doctorow is the author of two science fiction novels, Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, both published by Tor books and circulated for free on the Internet under a Creative Commons license (his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, is also available). His day job is in London, working as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and UK Coordinator for the Creative Commons. He is also the co-editor of the popular weblog boing boing and is a Contributing Writer to Wired Magazine.

Max Fose is a Partner with the firm Integrated Web Strategy (IWS). IWS is an Internet consulting company specializing in helping campaigns, corporations, and non-profit associations integrate the Internet into their overall communication and fundraising strategy.

Prior to becoming a partner with IWS, Fose was the Internet Manager and Treasurer for the McCain 2000 presidential campaign. As the Internet Manager, he created an interactive Web site that not only organized more than one hundred thousand volunteers nationwide, but also raised an historic $6.4 million through the Internet.

Max Fose was named to the list of "25 Internet professionals who are changing the world of politics" by Politics Online, Harvard University, and the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC).

Fose sat for two years as an Expert Panelist for the Congress Online Project that studied and recommended best practices to the United States Congress. He also co-authored The Internet and Campaigns: Interactively Empowering Citizens for the Chicago Policy Review and served as a Practitioner in Residence at the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University.

Max Fose has serviced a wide range of clients that include three Presidential campaigns, nationwide non-profit organizations, statewide Senatorial, gubernatorial and initiative campaigns, and Mayoral races for some of Americas largest cities.

Scott Heiferman is the CEO of Meetup.com, a global non-partisan platform that helps people organize local monthly real-world gatherings about anything anywhere. Scott co-founded Meetup.com in 2002, Fotolog.net in 2002 (the leading photo weblog platform, used by over a quarter million people and viewed by nearly 1 million people daily) and i-traffic in 1995 (the first online ad agency, a pioneer in search-keyword media placement and now one of the largest online media buyers, with offices in the U.S. and Europe).

Over 1 million people (and growing) have signed up to Meetup with a group of neighbors about knitting, chihuahuas, diabetes, George Bush, and thousands of other topics.

In 1994, Scott was "Interactive Marketing Frontiersman" at Sony, where he created Sony's first consumer online presence. He graduated from The University of Iowa and has posted a photo on his personal Fotolog every day for three years.

Arianna Huffington
is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of ten books. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in Economics. At twenty-one she became President of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

In 2003, she ran for governor as an Independent in California's recall election. Her populist grassroots campaign was widely praised for putting the media spotlight on the corrupting influence of special interest money on American politics.

Her New York Times bestseller,"Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America", was published in 2003. Her latest book, "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America" (April 2004), offers both a scathing portrait of our contemporary political landscape and a bold, inspiring, yet practical approach to restoring America to the promise envisioned by our greatest leaders.

During Campaign '96, Arianna teamed up with Al Franken to provide political coverage for Comedy Central during the Republican and Democratic conventions, as well as on election night. She and Franken also appeared in a point-counterpoint segment, Strange Bedfellows, for Politically Incorrect.

She serves on several boards that promote community solutions to social problems, including A Place Called Home that works with at-risk children in South Central Los Angeles. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Archer School for Girls, the advisory board of the Council on American Politics at George Washington University, and the board of the Reform Institute that works on campaign and election reform issues.

Jeff Jarvis is former TV critic for TV Guide and People, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday Editor of the NY Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner. He is now president & creative director of Advance.net and blogs at Buzzmachine.com.

Senator Bob Kerreyis President of New School University in New York City. For twelve years prior to becoming President of New School University, Bob Kerrey represented the State of Nebraska in the United States Senate. Before that he served as Nebraska's Governor for four years.

Educated in pharmacy at the University of Nebraska, Bob Kerrey served three years in the United States Navy. After his military service, he started a chain of restaurants and health clubs in Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas.

Bob Kerrey entered the race for Governor of Nebraska with no prior political experience and was elected as a Democrat in a heavily Republican State. After serving a single four-year term, he returned to business. Upon the death of Nebraska's senior United States Senator, Kerrey became a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was elected in 1988 and re-elected in 1994. He chose not to run for re-election a third time because of the offer to be President of New School University and his desire to return to private life.

Bob Kerrey is the author of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir, published by Harcourt Books (May 2002). He served as a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, currently leads a five year writing challenge sponsored by The National Commission on Writing in America?s Schools and Colleges, and is co-chair with Newt Gingrich of The National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care.

Andrew McLaughlinis Senior Policy Counsel for Google Inc., based in New York City. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where his work has focused on the law and regulation of Internet and telecommunications networks. In recent years, he has focused primarily on developing countries, including Ghana, Mongolia, Kenya, Afghanistan, and South Africa. Since joining Google, Andrew has continued that work as a member of the Board of Directors of Bridges.org, an international non-profit organisation based in Cape Town that promotes the effective use of information and communications technology in the developing world to reduce poverty and improve citizens' lives.

From 1999-2002, Andrew helped to launch and manage the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. ICANN is the global non-profit organization responsible for coordinating the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, such as domain names and IP addresses.

From 1997-98, Andrew served as Counsel to Congressman Henry Waxman of Los Angeles. From 1995-97, he practiced law at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the team that challenged the U.S. government's Communications Decency Act, resulting in a Supreme Court victory and the landmark Internet free speech ruling in Reno v. ACLU. In 1994-95, Andrew clerked for Judge Gerald W. Heaney of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Nicco Mele was born in West Africa to foreign service parents, and graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1999. He went on to be the first webmaster at Common Cause, and then the producer of the Shadow Conventions website and live streaming webcasts during the 2000 presidential election cycle. Prior to joining the Dean campaign, Nicco worked as the webmaster of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York City. Nicco joined the Dean campaign during the last week of April 2003, and worked as the Director of Internet Operations managing the strategy, technical and design details of the Dean internet campaign through March 2004. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal and CNN, and in December of 2003 he was named one of the "best and brightest" by Esquire Magazine.

Jerry Michalski spent five years writing Esther Dyson's monthly technology newsletter Release 1.0 and co-hosting her annual conference, PC Forum. An independent consultant since 1998, Jerry helps organizations figure out what path to take through an ever-changing future, based largely on his expertise with social media and his pursuit of the word "consumer" for the past decade. Jerry believes that the sphere of Government has become consumerized, to its detriment, and will post here about ways that this is being remedied. Think of it as "small g" governance. His site and personal blog are at www.sociate.com.

Doc Searls is a writer and speaker on topics that arise where
technology and business meet. He is the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, the premier Linux monthly and one of the world's leading technology magazines. He also runs the Doc Searls' IT Garage, an online journal published by Linux Journal's parent company, SSC. He is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Borders Books and Amazon.com bestseller. He also writes Doc Searls Weblog. J.D. Lasica of Annenberg's Online Journalism Review calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." Doc's blog is consistently listed among the top few blogs, out of millions ? by Technorati, Blogstreet and others.

Joe Trippi, heralded on the cover of The New Republic as the man who "reinvented campaigning," was born in California and began his political career working on Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1980. His work in presidential politics continued with the campaigns of Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and most recently Howard Dean.

As a campaign manager, Trippi has run presidential, Senate, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns. He was selected by former Vice President Walter Mondale to manage Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses in 1984 and later went on to run several key states for the Mondale for President campaign. In 1988, Trippi was the Deputy National Campaign Manager for Richard Gephardt's presidential campaign. In 2004, he was National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, pioneering the use of online technology to organize what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics. Through Trippi's innovative use of the internet for small-donor fundraising, Dean for America ended up raising more money than any Democratic presidential campaign in history, all with donations averaging less than $100 each.

Joe Trippi is an MSNBC elections analyst, Harvard University fellow and heads the Washington, DC political consultancy, Trippi & Associates.

Trippi is the author of, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything," the story of how his revolutionary use of the Internet and an impassioned, contagious desire to overthrow politics as usual grew into a national grassroots movement and changed the face of politics, and indeed many aspects of American life, forever.

David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He was Senior Internet Advisor to the Dean campaign. He has written for a wide range of publications about the intersection of technology, ideas and values; he is a senior editor at Worthwhile Magazine and a columnist for KMWorld. He is currently a fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His main blog is Joho. He has not appeared on Oprah.

Organizational references are for personal identification purposes only; comments posted by our bloggers reflect their own personal views only and should not be taken to reflect the positions of the organizations they work for.

TechPresident.com also includes several innovative features for tracking the 2008 presidential campaign online [some of these are still in development]:

A daily digest of fresh news clips, blog posts and campaign initiatives
Live from-the-campaign-trail photo feeds created by voters
Campaign website reviews
Links to campaign ads and websites (official and unofficial)
Charts showing who's winning the most friends on MySpace and Facebook
A chart showing the most YouTube channel views and subscribers for each candidate
Detailed tracking of incoming blog links showing who's hot and why
Up-down voting on each candidate [to come]
A searchable repository of emails from each campaign [to come]

The 2008 candidates are running 'e-lection' campaigns, USA Today, 4/4/07
Who's the Most Web Savvy '08 Candidate?, ABC News, 3/20/07
Which 2008 Candidates Are Most Web Savvy?, Newsweek, 3/5/07

Myspace race on the campaign trail, Chicago Tribune, 2/26/07

Presidential candidates ramp up web presence dramatically, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2/18/07

TechPresident: Tracking Candidate Use of MySpace, YouTube, AdSense, TechCrunch, 2/14/07