Welcome to our new group blog on how the presidential campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them, TechPresident.com. This blog is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, our online zine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. Over there, we'll continue to cover all the ways the political arena is being reshaped by new tools and practices born on the web, while over here we're going to drill down on what the presidential campaigns are doing online, and vice-versa, how bottom-up initiatives launched by ordinary people, what we call voter-generated content, are going to impact the campaign.

Dear candidates and campaign managers:

Why is it, after grassroots donors gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Dem presidential candidates in the 2004 cycle, that you are now completely ignoring them in this cycle? I'm not saying you shouldn't be courting large donors. But instead of spending ALL your time between high-dollar fundraisers and donor "call time," why not just spend at least 15 or 20 minutes per day doing things to win the hearts of the mass base of Democratic donors and activists?

This issue [Obama's MySpace Brouhaha] reminds me of questions that we had to deal with all the time on the Dean campaign. We called people like Joe Anthony "centers of gravity"-- people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

I'm not sure how far we should take this analogy, but Ron Paul is to the Republicans of 2008 as Howard Dean was to the Democrats of 2004: the one candidate speaking out prominently against the war when his colleagues were silent or supportive. Since politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, we shouldn't be surprised that he's starting to take off online.

The news is buzzing today as Fred Thompson has quit "Law & Order" in order to launch a presidential bid. He has also indicated he plans to use the internet extensively in his campaign. In a blog post to Pajama Media last week, Thompson wrote, "So, I hear you all have been talking about me." And thus begins his online conversation with voters. Clearly, the tone is intimate and personal, just as a blog post should be.

And it seems he really does understand the power of the internet to transform politics.

"Whether or not the Internet can elect any particular candidate in any particular race, it’s clear that all of you and our many friends across the blogosphere and the Web are part of a true information revolution. That’s why so much of my effort has been focused on talking to Americans through this medium. By empowering individuals and building communities, the Internet provides a way of going around the inside-the-beltway crowd to reach people in numbers unheard of not that long ago."

On this day in the parallel universe of the 2003-2004 cycle, we were all watching history being made. The politics of money in presidential primaries was being turned on its head forever by a daring gamble by Joe Trippi. Or so we thought at the time. None of the 2008 campaigns on either side have attempted to repeat the Dean 2003 miracle. As a result, no second tier candidate will break into the first tier this week, and Big Money will dominate just as it did in the first quarter of this year.

Not only should Republicans be worrying about how their presidential candidates run the YouTube gauntlet at their September debate in St. Petersburg, Democratic web maven Joe Trippi tells David All that in the general election, they face being completely overwhelmed by the "gigantic community" the Democratic field is generating online.

Today, I got a friend request on Facebook from Howard Dean, and I decided to break my own rule on accepting such requests from politicians, because I wonder how he's going to use Facebook...and if he'll now respond to my email to him.

So, this afternoon I got an email reading, "Howard Dean sent you a message on Facebook." (This is after I decided to accept his friend invitation yesterday.) Well, it wasn't really from Dean. What I did get was an email from the person who is paid to "be" Howard Dean on Facebook, or rather, one of the staffers behind his profile, Stephanie Taylor, the managing editor of Democrats.org. I wish I could say I was disappointed to not hear directly from the Governor, but this is what I expected. Let's parse what she wrote...

Howard Dean gave the one of the first keynotes tonight and it was very, very impressive.