(Crossposted from ClickZ.)

Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million. Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.

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Whatever you think of the eight long years of the Bush Administration, it has - thus far - seemed a model of cooperation in the transition to its successor. That gracious and practical spirit extends to the succession of power on the web - to the obvious chagrin of one popular right-wing blogger.

Michelle Malkin "exposes" the machinations behind President-elect Obama's use of a dot-gov domain for his Change.gov transition site, complete with FOIA request and gotcha document scans. Except to these eyes, what Malkin has exposed is simple patriotic goodwill on the part of the Bush team has it hands over the virtual keys of government to the Obama geeks.

Hidden in all of this is the fact that the Internet is now a mass medium. More people watched the Sarah Palin SNL skits on Hulu than live on television. Obama videos were watched for 1 billion minutes on YouTube. That works out to about 7 minutes for every American that voted on November 4th, or the equivalent of 14 thirty second spots.

The Internet has become television. Or, at least, there is now a powerful streak within the Internet that allows broadly popular candidates with mass (not niche) appeal to survive. This has coincided with the rise of web video, which allows the pecking order of celebrity in the offline world to be recreated online.

More than two-thirds of the 500,000 Obama volunteers who responded to an online survey asking about their interest in future activities in the wake of their involvement with the campaign responded that they "would like to continue to volunteer in the communities as part of an Obama for America 2.0 organization." And the number one thing these volunteers said they want to do next is work to support the next President's legislative agenda.

So reported Paulette Aniskoff, the Obama Pennsylvania field director, who shared those numbers this past weekend during the Rootscamp gathering at Trinity College in Washington, DC. Saturday afternoon's talk by Aniskoff attracted at least 100 out of the approximately 500 people attending the "unconference." More details after the jump...

It's worth taking a moment to applaud the work of Macon Phillips and the other members of the Obama transition new media team, for how they have hit the ground running and built a dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open and creative government website. Every day, it seems, some new element appears on Change.gov...details after the jump.

News continues to dribble out of Chicago on the future of Obama for America. First, Obama blogger Christopher Hass says there are now some 4,000 house parties occurring this weekend across the country to foster discussion of the movement's future--a healthy jump from a week ago. Second, attendees at last weekend's summit meeting in Chicago have received the following memo by email, which they've been urged to share widely. A copy made its way to my in-box and I reprint it below:

Some information is starting to filter out of this past weekend's "summit" in Chicago of about 300 key organizers from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign (evenly divided between regional field directors, field organizers, and team leaders). Details after the jump...

While most of the country's attention is focused on the transition underway in Washington, another vitally important transition is taking place right now in Chicago. I'm referring, of course, to the future of the Obama movement and network, or what some organizers refer to as "OFA2" (as in, Obama for America II). Thanks to reporting by Peter Wallsten in the Los Angeles Times, we know that "This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit at a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan."

What exactly is going on? The Obama people are saying very little. For a team that has been refreshingly open about the transition in Washington, the transition to OFA2, which seems to be de facto centered in Chicago, has been a totally top-down, one-way affair.

Yes, the Obama political team has been asking for input from its supporters about the future of OFA2. But what kind of guidance can isolated individuals and disconnected house parties give, other than vague affirmations of the need for "change" and their desire to pitch in? (The suggested agenda for the hosts of these meetings, as posted on the Obama website, is also mostly focused on each group determining its own priorities, rather than being part of a national conversation about the future of the Obama grassroots movement.) And how motivating can it be to participate in a one-way process, especially when the internet makes multiway communication and collective deliberation so energizing and empowering? That's the question; let's dig into the details after the jump.

(Reposted from ClickZ)

Barack Obama and John McCain duked it out till the very end online, with ads that went after specific audiences in important swing states. Sites across the Web were drowned in hundreds of millions of Obama's voter registration and state-targeted early voting ads in the final weeks. Meanwhile, the McCain camp attacked, asked for cash, and played the Palin card in display ads more focused on persuading voters than the campaign's earlier ads had been. Joe the Plumber made an appearance, too, of course.

Before Broadway shows open in New York City, they're often taken for a trial run out in the American heartland to work out the kinks. And with this latest four-minute installment in Barack Obama's pre-presidential video productions posted on YouTube, you definitely get the feeling that somewhere there's an obsessive director making tweaks before taking a more polished show to Washington DC in seven weeks. (The video's down below.)