Personal Democracy Forum has launched a terrific blog — techPresident.com — on how the presidential campaigns are using technology. For example, Joshua Levy blogs about Fred Stutzman’s post about my.barackobama.com, Obama’s “private-label social network.” Here’s a bit of what Fred says:

In reality, 2008 is going to be about the enmeshing of networks. Some of the action that goes on in the networks will be centrally maintained, but some (as in the example of the Facebook group) will be produced by people external to the campaign. Should candidates put their head in the sand and act like the external work doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. The simple reality is that by embracing social media, communities are going to play a significant role in the creation of the candidate. Like it or not, some of Obama’s online identity is going to be created by the Facebook group, over which he has no control. The millions of users who embrace Obama in one way or another will get their messages from a number of different sources, so central control is effectively impossible.

The TechPresident feed is going straight into my aggregator… [Tags: personaldemocracy democracy techpresident fred_stuzman obama politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]