Allen Fuller has a great post up discussing Fred's online announcement on September 6th. For whatever reason, people's antennae seem to go up whenever there's an inkling of Fred running a video-based campaign, and this is no exception.

Fred Thompson will launch a legitimate campaign for President via webcast. That's just unreal. Sure, Hillary and Edwards and all them did it months ago, but that was months ago when there was no pressure and relatively little media attention. I'm as much of a new media guy as anyone, and I applaud them for going for it, but this is risky at best. Friends of Fred Thompson will not get nearly the attention from the mainstream media as a big event on the square in Lawrenceburg, Tenn. would. On the other hand, this does play to his strength. He is a professional TV actor after all. I'd imagine they will allow networks to play the broadcast-quality video live as well. Either way it is a go-for-broke strategy and I'm interested to see how it plays out.

I for one applaud Fred for announcing on the Web. It's a strategy I've advocated for candidates in different settings for months. With that said, context matters. And to put it mildly, I don't think they've handled the run-up to this announcement very well.

MoveOn.org Political Action is hiring, looking for someone to work "on the development of cutting edge online organizing tools." The job description lays out an ambitious but not unrealistic plan for the giant e-group, and hints at some significant upgrades in its integration of technology in its field organizing. Can the Right match it?

New vs. Traditional media is apples and oranges, Cybersecurity advice for the next President, DNC responds to "Democrats Praising McCain" ad, McCain offers prizes to spammers and realizes his recent YouTube dominance, and the #dontgo Twitter debate continues...

Obama texts his supporters his choice of VP, is Obama the first "cybergenic" candidate?, What will McCain do for VP?, Obama hits back at two McCain ads, the blogs respond to Edwards' extramarital affair, Bush enjoys women's beach volleyball, and Barack gets "Rick Rolled"

Let's hope President-elect Barack Obama had a restful Tuesday night, because it's about the only time in the next two and a half months that he won't have someone whispering in his ear with advice on what kind of presidency his should be; Perhaps even more important than the question of who will be the nation's first Chief Technology Officer is the matter of how much real juice he or she will have; As we look forward, let's not forget to look back at how we got to where we are; and more.

It's the story of a scrappy bootstrapped organization thinking it can take on the big boys through grit, long hours, and some of the neatest tools the Internet's ever dreamed up. Nope, it's not the story of Shawn Fanning and Napster or Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. It's the rise and presidency of Barack Obama, says the New York Times David Carr; Of course, it's still possible to look at this election and see it as simply the triumph of a uniquely able politician, his crafty band of savant strategists, and a favorable political climate. Indeed, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza writes a 7,000-word "How Obama Won" piece with hardly a mention of the Internet; The Washington Post's Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk suggest that the Obama White House will have an even "more ambitious" version of the campaign's 95-member new media department; and a good deal more.

In a victory that holds deep lessons for how nonprofit organizations and cause-driven ventures will organize volunteers and build support in the future, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States Tuesday in a near-landslide victory keyed by state-of-the-art social networking and online organizing.

The story of the Obama triumph is a political one to be sure; the campaign used all the traditional methods of organizing party politics, from endorsements and open-air rallies to television advertisements and neighborhood canvassing. It super-charged those traditional methods with the best online strategy ever employed in a national campaign, leveraging a digital toolset that kept supporters constantly in touch with the campaign superstructure. The Obama campaign carefully controlled the overall message and story - but it also made the key decision to free up content, unleash self-organized social networks, and encourage third-party innovations in software, web advocacy, and new media.

But it would be a mistake to view the Obama campaign solely as revolution within the political sphere.

Backers of California's Proposition 8, which enshrined a ban on same-sex marriages in the state constitution, scored a narrow victory on November 4th, winning 52.3% of the vote. The immediate impact in California is huge: the invalidation of 18,000 marriages. But that vote didn't put an end to the fierce debate, not even close. People have been protesting Prop 8's success in Los Angeles, San Diego, and, as the LA Times put it, "even Modesto." What was largely a state legal battle seems to be morphing into a national cultural moment, helped along by the web, including Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

The online arm of President-elect Barack Obama's transition is filling out with some familiar faces; Sure, even the bold-faced names in Obamaland from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to possible Attorney General Janet Napolitano seems to have a Facebook profile, as the New York Observer's Gillian Reagan reports. But, details the New York Times' Jackie Calmes, applicants for every one of the thousands of available executive-branch jobs must be open to having their online lives thoroughly vetted; So, what is the campaign-turned-transition to do with all those volunteers who powered their victory? Campaign field director Jon Carson told NPR's Mara Liasson that "We've run sort of a giant experiment here in volunteer management, and we want to take a look at the lessons learned from that." But some of those volunteers aren't waiting for instruction; and more.

The Los Angeles Times' Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger have a look inside the debate happening over what should happen to the robust online network built by the Obama campaign; NextGov's Allan Holmes looks at some of the contenders to be the nation's first Chief Technology Officer and concludes that "honchos from Silicon Valley are not that suitable for this position;" Slate's Christopher Beam asks if the sort of transparency promised by the Obama campaign is unequivocally good; and a good deal more.