"Today we're trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues -- with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top."

Ordinarily, you wouldn't get too excited about reading those words on a website. But when they are on the official blog of the President-elect, things are a little different. In fact, this is a big deal. When you consider that for the last eight years, the occupant of the White House has essentially told the public "you get input once every four years, after that I'm the decider," this is huge.

The election is a week away, but two new online projects were just launched focusing on involving the public in what comes next. BigDialog.org and Whitehouse2.org are complimentary efforts that seek to crowd-source the process of putting pressing questions before the President-elect and identifying the top priorities of the public. We don't know yet if the next President will join in and respond, but if these sites garner a lot of participation, he'd be wise to pay attention.

With the election 20 days away, both major presidential campaigns are focusing more of their energies on the "ground game" of galvanizing their volunteer base and getting out the vote. Both campaigns' websites make it easy for supporters to search for upcoming events near them (Obama's Events page is here; McCain's is both on his home page and here), but the other night while playing around with both sites' tools, I discovered that Obama's campaign will also allow you to export the resulting list as a structured data file, which for the geeks in the audience is like manna from heaven. In particular, you can get a KML file, which is short for "Keyhole Markup Language"--which means you can easily put Obama's events on Google Earth.

From that realization, it wasn't far to this: a visualization of all of Obama's upcoming events (there are more than 10,000 I think) between now and Election Day:

Michael Brown, the man who made "Dear Mr. Obama," the viral video that is currently exploding on YouTube among supporters of John McCain and the Iraq War, is a professional film-maker with about a dozen years of experience under his belt running a company called Testimony Pictures. He's made one full-length feature, and lots of shorter videos, mostly for the Christian market. (You can find some samples of his work here and here.) But, he says, "I've never done anything like this before," and he is completely overwhelmed by the reaction to the video. Judging from a half-hour phone conversation with me, I think it's fair to say this is the real deal: a piece of voter-generated content, made by a pro but not a political hack--you can call him a pro-am--that is entering the national consciousness via the small-n network called the internet.

Michael Brown, the man who made "Dear Mr. Obama," the viral video that is currently exploding on YouTube among supporters of John McCain and the Iraq War, is a professional film-maker with about a dozen years of experience under his belt running a company called Testimony Pictures. He's made one full-length feature, and lots of shorter videos, mostly for the Christian market. (You can find some samples of his work here and here.) But, he says, "I've never done anything like this before," and he is completely overwhelmed by the reaction to the video. Judging from a half-hour phone conversation with me, I think it's fair to say this is the real deal: a piece of voter-generated content, made by a pro but not a political hack--you can call him a pro-am--that is entering the national consciousness via the small-n network called the internet.

If you are one of the 41% of Americans who think the US invasion of Iraq was not a mistake, it looks like this video, showing a wounded veteran, Army Specialist Joe Cook, speaking in support of John McCain, could be your viral video of election 2008. As of this morning, "Dear Mr. Obama" has garnered more than 4.8 million views since being posted on August 27. Cook's heartfelt and straightforward attack on Obama for calling the Iraq war a mistake is clearly striking a chord, and my guess is this video will soon be hitting the cable channels and the mainstream media. Which raises the question: Who made it? Was this made by someone with ties to the McCain campaign? Or is it a real piece of voter-generated content?

If you are one of the 41% of Americans who think the US invasion of Iraq was not a mistake, it looks like this video, showing a wounded veteran, Army Specialist Joe Cook, speaking in support of John McCain, could be your viral video of election 2008. As of this morning, "Dear Mr. Obama" has garnered more than 4.8 million views since being posted on August 27. Cook's heartfelt and straightforward attack on Obama for calling the Iraq war a mistake is clearly striking a chord, and my guess is this video will soon be hitting the cable channels and the mainstream media. Which raises the question: Who made it? Was this made by someone with ties to the McCain campaign? Or is it a real piece of voter-generated content?

It's one thing to read about an event in the newspaper; it's another thing to watch the event in its unexpurgated form as raw, unedited video. And as more people carry video cameras or video-enabled mobile phones, it's a safe bet that high-, medium- and even low-visibility political events are going to be recorded by participants and find their way to the web. Not every video will be a "macaca" moment, but these primary documents have their own power to persuade or affect opinions precisely because they're so organically real. Such is the case with Barack Obama's appearance yesterday at a Boca Raton synagogue

A large chunk of this presidential election is shaping up to be about tone: big change vs. little change, hope vs. experience. To see how these ideas are manifesting themselves among voters, one needs to look no further than Zazzle.com, the online site where people can design their own bumper stickers, buttons, and t-shirts.

It's been about a week since Mitt Romney's campaign launched the most interactive experiment of any we've seen come from the Republican side of the presidential field, calling on their supporters to submit 30- or 60-second TV ads, mashing up a rich array of clips, audio and photos provided by the campaign.

It's a smart way for the campaign to engage grass-roots supporters, and to also erase any memories people may have of Romney's reluctance to participate in the Republican YouTube debate. And, as a number of observers predicted, it's also a bit of a double-edged sword.