The sudden interest in Obamagirl's Crush on Barack music video provides a great opporunity to talk once more about the nature of internet communications. As I have often argued, the net is a chaotic message environment precisely because it enables anyone, as long as they have access to a wired computer, to post their own ideas and opinions. And this content has no editor other than the poster.

So, just as the 1984 video before swept through the campaign news cycle, the Obamagirl video may be starting its sweep now.

But what does this mean for the candidate?

So what's it gonna be once and for all -- should we treat bloggers as citizens or as journalists? The debate rages on over at Buckeye State Blog, where a blogger named Jerid posted about being blocked out of one of Barack Obama's "Faith, Action, Change" forums at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

Beating up on Times political reporter Adam Nagourney is a hobby gleefully enjoyed in many corners of the Interweb, but now that he's ventured onto OUR turf, it's time for a quick barrage of jabs, hooks and vicious undercuts, e.politics-style. Why? Writing Wednesday about Joe Trippi and the John Edwards web team, Nagourney shows exactly how well he can channel a campaign's spin uncritically and without context.

Now, Joe Trippi is a damn smart guy and the Edwards folks may well be using the 'net in interesting ways, but the only way you'd know it from THIS article is because they tell us they are, not because Nagourney shows any actual evidence. This key paragraph lets us know what we're in for:

James Kotecki, a.k.a. EmergencyCheese on YouTube, is likely a well-known personality for this crowd. And James' appeal as a citizen journalist and YouTube "guru," dispatching his advice to candidates on how best to connect with the YouTube community, has doled up its fair-share of press from the mainstream media.

But now, James... is the mainstream media. At least, sort of. And its his experience jumping from "Citizen Journalist" to "Journalist" that I wanted to include in this space through an email interview with James.

The quick background is that James went to the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa as a paid freelancer for one of our favorite stops, the Politico.com. You can see all of the products of his experience on his YouTube channel.

Let's dig in...

MTV takes another innovative step into social media with the launch of its new citizen-journalist press corps.

Well, who was the big loser in the Iowa caucuses? It wasn't Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton, and it certainly wasn't Ron Paul. The big loser was political punditry.

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."

Is a nationwide truckers' strike just over the horizon? As gasoline prices climb towards and past $4 a gallon, something is brewing that--with the help of the web--could very well upend the flatlining presidential primaries and force hard economic questions that none of the presidential candidates really want to wrestle with to the center of the national conversation.

Lots of people are being hurt by the emerging recession--people whose homes are being foreclosed, people who are being laid off, people who can't find a job--but for the most part their pain is private, and their efforts to seek solutions or answers tend to also remain private, even in the age of what writer Clay Shirky has aptly called "ridiculously easy group formation." By contrast, truckers have always been uniquely well connected to each other, via old-fashioned CB radio technology. But now the Internet may add a powerful boost to their nascent calls for a social response to economic pain.

I'm at the Politics Web 2.0 conference at the University of London, Royal Hollaway, and things have just kicked off. As always with my visits to conferences, I will try to blog that which I find interesting (I'm no Ethan Zuckerman) and all my renderings are not verbatim, but rough paraphrasing. Here are my notes on one of the first keynotes, which definitely held my attention. Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, is presenting on "Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government." This is one area where the possible impact of the internet has been underestimated, especially within the community, she starts off. These technologies could have a huge meaning for government.

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).