A new site is rigorously fact-checking the candidates and rating their statements on a Truth-O-Meter. It's yielding fascinating results and could be an essential resource in 2008, but what about the participatory web and the wisdom of the crowd?

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).

The online mini-rising to protest Barack Obama's support for the Congressional compromise to renew the FISA legislation has been getting a lot of attention, with much being made (by us and plenty of others, including Ari Melber in the Nation, The New York Times, et al) that activists are using Obama's own social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com, to organize and channel their efforts to get him to alter his stand. Indeed, as of today the Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right group has swelled to more than 14,000 members, which makes it the single largest self-organized group on the whole platform, which reportedly has close to a million registered members.

This is certainly a good example of what thinkers like Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce have been talking about, when it comes to "ridiculously easy group formation" (qua Shirky) and how "Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment" (qua Pesce). But right now the main reason this development is important is NOT because the group itself is that powerful; it's because attention-amplifiers in the blogosphere and the MSM are covering the story and thus threatening some of Obama's hard-won image as a change agent, which could conceivably weaken his vaunted fundraising and organizing machine. So while the Obama campaign is keeping a poker face about the importance of some of its members using the master's tools to challenge his position, it is no doubt paying attention, too.

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

Carlo Scannella is a graduate student in the media studies department at The New School in New York City and one of the organizers of the Get FISA Right movement. We're happy to have him here. -- Nancy

The story of the Get FISA Right group has already been covered
heavily in the press. Here's
the 30 second version: A group protesting Barack Obama's decision to
support the current FISA legislation appeared
on his campaign website, and as tens of thousands of individuals
joined, it became not only the largest group on his site, but a
movement strong enough to force Obama to take notice. His response to the Get FISA Right group was a moment of validation; this became
something real.

Maybe a bit too real, as I found myself on Fourth of July weekend
sitting alone in a room on a conference call with 10 or so people I
had never met before in my life, logged into my email, editing a wiki,
organizing a political movement at breakneck speed -- all while my
family ate barbecue without me.

A group of Obama supporters has crowdsourced the Fight the Smears campaign with a new website, Smearbusters.org. Using search engine results, the site compiles a list of smears ("Guilt-by-association with Ayers" is one, with 180 hits) and then brokers the smears to a team of volunteers. The idea is that the volunteer will go to the forum, blog comment thread, etc. and join in the discussion, providing counterbalance to the smear.

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, who just endorsed Barack Obama, tells Arianna Huffington, another Obama supporter, that "We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," thanks to the internet and tools like YouTube. And Huffington amplifies his point, writing today:

Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed.

Leaving aside the fact that both Schmidt and Huffington are both rooting for Obama to win, and therefore are inclined to color every McCain attack in the darkest terms possible, I think they have a point. Something significant has changed in just the last four years. We are collectively witnessing, and simultaneously creating, a networked public sphere that continuously scours the world for interesting information and collectively bubbles the most important stuff to greater view.

Today's announcement of the formation of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, covered in detail here by DemConWatchBlog, left me wondering about two things.
1. If the transition senior staff includes a communications director (Dan Pfeiffer, who was communications director in the campaign), why doesn't it include an internet or new media director?
2. What kinds of interactive components will the transition website include? The announcement included a note saying that "the official website for the transition is www.change.gov and it will be live later today," but so far that site isn't live, at least not for me.

One thing I think we do know: it looks like Blue State Digital, the same powerhouse Democratic internet firm that handled Obama's online needs during the campaign, is building the www.change.gov site. Earlier today I took this screenshot of test.change.gov:

It looks like this url is now password protected.