Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here.

Naheed Nenshi became mayor of Calgary at the end of October not by outspending his rivals or hailing from the incumbent political class in Canada. Nenshi didn't plaster his campaign message across the television, and he didn't even buy a single newspaper advertisement.

Instead, Nenshi led a grassroots effort that mobilized soccer moms and utilized online activism on a Facebook page, on Twitter and on YouTube.

Other politicians have used Facebook and Twitter with success. So what was different about Nenshi's campaign?

Stephen Carter, who helped craft the online campaign strategy for Nenshi, credited "complete integration" for the success of the campaign's Internet efforts.

Integration

"It's one thing to have a social media policy, but frankly just having social media activity doesn't go far enough to actually making a campaign structure work," Carter said. "It's the integration of the online strategy, and we integrated our online strategy completely."

Calgary had just received a fresh batch of snow when I spoke to Carter, who runs the BBold PR new media public relations company in the city. During our phone conversation I asked him to elaborate on his integration strategy and identify what made the Nenshi campaign so special.

"If we were going to do something online, we would partner that online participation with everything else so that it was all supported," he said. "Our media relations strategy frankly became a social media strategy. If we wanted something to get really covered in the media, we launched it online. We wouldn't even send out a press release."

Carter said journalists now pay close attention to social media, which made a traditional press release a waste of time.

"Actually, social media became the story more often than not," Carter said. "When we launched our iPhone app that became the story. It really wasn't that innovative. In every election there's this desire to look for the magic bullet. Was social media the magic bullet for us? Absolutely not."

Authenticity

So if the Nenshi campaign shouldn't be regarded as pioneers of social media, what was so special about what they did? Put it this way: They didn't just use social media -- they actually used social media correctly.

"When Nenshi and about six of us around the table were talking about social media, we talked about integrating the message into social media so that Nenshi would be always authentic," Carter said. "The only person who had the password to Nenshi's Twitter account was Nenshi. There was no second account set up for the campaign. Everybody was real. Every person that worked for the Nenshi campaign had their own Twitter account, which allowed us to have authentic communications across the medium."

Nenshi campaign staffers also worked hard at starting online conversations. Whenever anyone from the campaign posted a message on Facebook, they set goals to see multiple comments underneath it. And as often as possible, Nenshi himself would answer questions posted on Facebook or Twitter.

All About the Data

Being authentic is one thing, but how do you know if your authenticity is being well received? Another major component to Carter's strategy was to gather data and constantly measure and analyze the campaign's online efforts.

"We trended on TrendsMap [which we used to perform] local tracking of our Twitter trends from the first day Nenshi announced he was running and basically every day thereafter to make sure we were tweeting and retweeting and pushing out our message every single day," Carter said. "The beautiful thing about social media is that it is entirely measurable.

Being able to measure the impact of social media through retweets and shares on Facebook helped guide the campaign when things didn't go according to plan -- such as during a dust up with Rick Hanson, Calgary's chief of police, over a pre-approved police budget.

Advertising Using Social Media

The final piece of the puzzle for Carter was advertising on Facebook. The campaign put out several different Facebook ads and regularly tested which ones worked.

"With our Facebook ads we decided we were going to try and appeal to middle aged women between 40 to 55, who live in the suburbs, have two kids and who have been or are soccer moms," Carter said. "Everyone has this impression that social media is a young person's medium. It's totally not. We knew that we could get social media activism from that particular group. We targeted them on Facebook and put out a number of messages that appealed to their demographic."

At the start of the Calgary election there was a total of 12 candidates. After raising about $60,000, Nenshi demonstrated he was a viable candidate. In August, Nenshi started at one percent support; he ended with 40 percent on election day.

Carter said the total amount raised during the campaign was about $300,000. Not bad considering how expensive large city elections have been for recent candidates.

"The biggest surprise was that the strategy was implemented exactly as planned," Carter said. "It is ridiculous. That never happens. We certainly didn't go into the campaign thinking that the strategy would work exactly as we wrote it, but it did."

Steven Davy is the web content editor at The World, a BBC, WGBH, PRI co-production. He is also the developer of Exploring Conversations, a multimedia website examining the language of music. He is the politics correspondent for MediaShift.

Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here.

Foursquare and Gowalla are the current crowned kings of geo-location and have been getting regular mentions in the tech blogosphere and beyond.

Geo-social is very much in its early stages, with smaller adoption rates compared with Twitter and Facebook. But it's still playing a role in this year's elections. Several campaigns have been updating their status with their location in the hope of being seen as on the cutting edge with social media, and as a new way to interact with voters.

The Foursquarian Candidate

Following the news that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley would not seek re-election after more than 20 years in office, digital marketing company Proximity Chicago recently announced a contest to annoint a new mayor using Foursquare.

The Proximity office in downtown Chicago has been dubbed the City of Chicago Mayoral Headquarters. Now people can check in on Foursquare when they are in the vicinity. The more often they check in, the higher they rank. The person with the most check-ins by October 31 becomes the Foursquarian Mayor and receives marketing materials such as logos, slogans, bumper stickers and signage, among other support from Proximity, to actually stage a real run for the job as mayor of Chicago.

The current Foursquarian mayor is Rob Mowry, who over a recent three-day period checked into Proximity's City of Chicago Mayoral Headquarters more than 50 times. Below is a look at some of the tweets and check-ins associated with the contest:

It's a fierce competition and the fact that there are subtle ways of cheating your location means the contest is not without a hat tip to political traditions in Chicago.

"It's still a new enough social media platform that it can be manipulated a little bit," said Kevin Lynch, creative lead at Proximity Chicago, who is heading up the Foursquarian project. "It's not truly a Chicago election without a little bit of controversy. This is in keeping with the established history of the city."

Lynch said in a phone interview that ideally the contest will garner attention for an unknown candidate, or enable a well-known candidate to show constituents they understand how communications work circa 2010. So far Rahm Emanuel and other top tier candidates have not checked in.

The Geo-Social Campaign Toolkit

In terms of the larger political season, Foursquare has not released an official badge or program. This is despite an online lobbying effort for the company to develop an "I voted" badge. Gowalla, however, is off to the races with the 2010 campaign toolkit it released in August.

[Update Oct. 27: Foursquare today announced that users who check in using the hashtag #ivoted will unlock the "I Voted" badge. The company, who partnered with Rock the Vote, Pew Center, Google and others, will make the related information available on an online map with data gathered from 107,000 polling stations.

Foursquare wrote on its site that the I Voted data visualization and badge initiative are part of an effort to "encourage civic participation, increase transparency in the voting process and develop a replicatable system for the 2012 Presidential Election." The map launches November 2nd."]

Gowalla's platform was initially adopted by candidates including Charlie Crist, Rick Perry and Jim Ward, with additional candidates jumping on board since.

"It's fun, but also a lot of work," Alejandro Garcia, Gov. Rick Perry's campaign spokesperson, said in a phone interview. "Anything that we feel might be a good tool we try out. It's sometimes hard to pinpoint what works."

The candidates, along with their supporters, can create Gowalla events to check into, including rallies, town halls and other political happenings. Additionally, campaigns can create candidate pages with an open "follow" button on their Gowalla Passports. People that attend fundraisers, meetings and other events receive the candidate's custom passport stamp for their Gowalla passport and an "I Voted" pin on election day.

Despite the buzz around geo-social, there isn't a lot of check-in activity on Crist, Perry and Ward's pages. (Rick Perry currently has 68 Gowalla followers, Charlie Crist has 55 and Jim Ward has 38.) Andy Ellwood, director of business development at Gowalla, said in a phone interview that activity in 2010 might be low, but the potential value for candidates could be significant.

"It's not just an 'I'm at Starbucks in Louisville,' " Ellwood said. "Candidates are pushing these types of initiatives [because] they don't just want their supporters to say they are following them, but to say, 'I've actually decided to use my time and my foot traffic to come out to an event that is specific to the way that I am going to vote in the elections.' "

Some critics argue that it's just too early for geo-social to make a big impact in the 2010 elections, and that the small number of early Foursquare and Gowalla adopters won't likely reach enough voters to justify a campaign's time and money.

All that suggests geo-social could still be a big thing come 2012.

Steven Davy is the web content editor at The World, a BBC,WGBH,PRI co-production. He is also the developer of Exploring Conversations, a multimedia website examining the language of music. He is the politics correspondent for MediaShift.

"The website really is that first real encounter with the voter; it's your chance to turn a casual visitor into an actual supporter," said Colin Delany, founder and chief editor of Epolitics.com.

A good website will get visitors to take action in some way. Often, one of the best small victories for a candidate is to get people to provide an email address for future contact. Email is like the gateway drug for a politician's campaign website, getting people involved one click at a time.

But that's just the beginning. Getting the basics right requires a dedication to making the simple things work for average folks.

Inspire Action

Joe Rospars, a founding partner of Blue State Digital and the new media director for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, said that a politician's website should make it as easy as possible for someone to figure out how they can help the candidate by either giving time, money or passing along information from the campaign site to friends.

"At a technical level, when there are too many clicks to get to the thing you want people to do and they want to do, that's a waste of their time and a missed opportunity," Rospars said.

Rospars also said a campaign needs to ask if the website is a true reflection of their offline operations. For national candidates, they must determine if the website offers opportunities to engage at the local, statewide and national levels. Is it the heartbeat of the campaign in terms of the latest news, information, organizational efforts and events that are going on?

Of course, a campaign website has to have good content. Delany said this content has to help persuade a potential supporter. At the same time, a website and online presence can't have so much going on, and be so complicated that a small team -- or the candidate herself -- can't keep everything updated.

"You want to reach people through the channels that they use," Daleny said, "but if you are out on 20 different social networks, you don't have time to maintain any of them well. You don't want to build any more than you can maintain."

Examples of Good and Bad

Daleny pointed to the re-election website of Sen. Harry Reid and the campaign site of Sean Duffy, who is running for Congress in Wisconsin's seventh district, as exceptional candidate websites. He noted that while the layouts are different, it's easy to find buttons for getting involved and where to find out more about the candidates. Additionally, Daleny suggested that Reid's emphasis on Nevada's landscape is something that might draw positive attention to his unpopular candidacy with something that constituents care for, while Duffy's emphasis is on him as a candidate.

In contrast, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's campaign site for his run for governor seems to have been inspired by BarackObama.com, according to Delany. But, he said, "it's so cluttered that it's almost an assault on the eyes...very hard to pick out the information you're actually looking for."

A website played an important role in the victory of Senator Scott Brown during Massachusetts' special election in January 2010. Robert Willington, a web and political strategist for the Brown campaign and executive director of RebuildTheParty.com, said the campaign website should act as a "hub" for what's happening at campaign headquarters and with the candidate.

"It's like the center part of the wheel that connects everything else," Willington said. He said the Brown campaign often used social media like Twitter to drive people to the site.

Tim Hysom works as the director for communications and technology services at the Congressional Management Foundation. He has also worked on the CMF's Gold Mouse Report, which recognizes the best websites on Capitol Hill. Hysom said a good candidate's website acts as a kind of virtual office.

"The website should be a place where every kind of information that the [actual] office could provide...is available to the greatest extent possible," he said.

Two examples of sites that do it right are the winners of the CMF's top award, the Platinum Mouse Award. Last year those were Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rep. Steve Israel from New York.

One thing that all good campaign websites have in common is that they get to the point quickly and do a good job of capturing a user's interest.

"At the end of the day what many people will give you is their first couple of seconds on the site," Rospars said. "If you don't make clear that they are important or that there are real opportunities to get involved and that it will be a meaningful thing for them, they are gone."

Steven Davy is the web content editor at The World, a BBC,WGBH,PRI co-production. He is also the developer of Exploring Conversations, a multimedia website examining the language of music. He is the politics correspondent for MediaShift.

How could a nine-term Congressman, a ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and now a candidate for the gubernatorial race in Michigan fail to register PeteHoekstra.com?

The domain belongs to Ben Padnos, who is originally from the Holland, Mich., area that Hoekstra represents. Padnos, now of California, is using the site for what he said in a phone interview is a campaign against Hoekstra's gubernatorial campaign.

"Something as basic as owning your own name -- I mean it's like check box number one if you are running for political office," Padnos said. "Anybody who doesn't go out and do that, in my eyes there are serious questions of judgment."

Hoekstra's campaign did not reply to interview requests.

Cybersquatting in Politics

Critics of Padnos have accused him of cybersquatting, the registration of domain names (misspellings and all) in the hope of making money by selling the rights of the domains at inflated prices.

Cybersquatting, despite being outlawed in 1999 with the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, or ACPA, has had a history of hit-or-miss challenges in court, especially when it comes to political figures.

The ACPA is focused on trademarks that show up in domain names. It is rare for a politician to register their name as a trademark because, as Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, a
residential fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford noted in an email interview, it's difficult to register a personal name because most names are not unique.

"Without a trademark registration, the politician has to prove they have common law trademark rights," she said. "A name is not automatically a trademark. Rather, it must be used in commerce in connection with goods and services."

Karl Kronenberger, a partner at the law firm Kronenberger Burgoyne, which specializes in Internet law, suggested that perhaps a politician like Arnold Schwarzenegger might be different in this regard because there may be products with Schwarzenegger's name on them.

The problem for politicians is that if they are running for office, it's pretty easy for someone to register a name and then engage in First Amendment activity. However, Kronenberger said there are some things that could cut against this argument.

"For example, if [the domain registrants] are placing ads on the site, if they are selling things on the site, if they are redirecting that site to a site that is commercial in nature," Kronenberger said. "Then, their First Amendment argument is weakened."

ICANN Arbitration

Ben Padnos says he is donating any money made on PeteHoekstra.com to charity, so ACPA litigation doesn't appear likely. But there is another avenue for the Hoekstra people to pursue called the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) settles with arbitration cases.

This route has challenges for the politician as well. Kim Davies, root zone services manager at ICANN suggested in a phone interview that, again, it really depends on the conduct of the person who has registered the domain and what they've actually done with that domain.

"If you are trying to pretend that you are someone else, or you are trying to use the domain to imply that you are officially connected to some other party, that might be adjudicated as something in bad faith," Davies said.

Both avenues allow the politician to get ownership of, or shut down, the site if they prevail, but the federal court route is more costly and time-consuming. Padnos is likely again off the hook.

Paying For Your (Domain) Name

Back in 2002, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then Maryland's lieutenant governor, made an unsuccessful bid for governor of Maryland. During her run, Townsend attempted to register domain names close to her name only to discover that several of the web addresses, including kennedytownsend.org and kathleenkennedytownsend.com had been snatched up by a man from Maryland.

Townsend took her dispute to the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Center (an approved ICANN arbitrator). The ruling held that the man could keep the sites because they were not connected with commercial exploitation.

In a recent post for the Hill's Hillicon Valley technology blog, Sean Miller cited Republican web strategist David All who said it's not impossible to get potentially-cybersquatting registrants to hand over important campaign URLs. But the process can be costly. Just ask Meg Whitman.

Whitman, the former head of eBay, is a Republican candidate for governor of California. Before she formally announced her candidacy, there was speculation that she would run. A man named Thomas Hall registered several of the Whitman-related domains back in 2008.

Whitman took her case to the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization to dispute Hall's ownership of the URLs. Having failed at the U.N., Whitman pursued a legal case arguing Hall was cybersquatting.

To reclaim her name URLs, Whitman eventually reached a settlement and paid for the domains. Nancy Scola of TechPresident suggested that the whole process likely came at the expense of several hundred thousand dollars.

So if you're an aspiring politician, registering your own name URL should be one of your first steps.

As Kronenberger noted, "It seems like a complete waste of money to pay an attorney to try to get a domain name."

Correction May 26, 2010: This story originally reported that Rep. Hoekstra had served seven terms. He is serving his ninth.

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally, he hosts a current affairs newsmagazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven recently created Exploring Conversations as a multimedia website examining the language of music for his graduate thesis project at Michigan State University.

But the Obama campaign wouldn't have been able to make its technological strides without the innovations first deployed by the Howard Dean campaign years before; and, in turn, the designers of the Dean campaign made sure to study the technology lessons of Jessie Ventura's successful gubernatorial run.

The dawn of the Internet era and introduction of technologies such as email lists and social media have had a remarkable impact on American politics. Below are some highlights, game-changing moments, and other uses of technology that stand as significant moments in political history.

The Internet Era

An early moment in any timeline about modern tech development in politics is the February 1997 creation of the GOP Internet forum FreeRepublic. To put it in perspective, 1998 was the year Google was founded. It was also the year that MoveOn was created for progressives as a political community formed in response to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Another early note: I would be remiss not to include the now famous 1999 Al Gore interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition," when the the vice president declared, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth." Though technically not claiming credit for the Internet, Gore's comments would become famous.

2000

Following Sen. John McCain's 2000 primary win in New Hampshire, the New York Times ran a story with this headline: His Success in New Hampshire Brings McCain an Overnight Infusion of Cybercash. The story cited figures released by the McCain campaign that suggested he raised more than $500,000 over the Internet in less than 24 hours after the polls closed. This was a significant moment for online fundraising.

The 2000 election year saw the Bush campaign make innovative use of phone bank technology for get-out-the-vote initiatives. It also used email lists to drive voters to action.

That campaign year was notable for the use of online ads. A study from AdRelevance, Nielsen Online's service that tracks advertising activity, was reported in USA Today on October 30, 2000. It suggested that "Republicans used a more 'targeted' approach, while Democrats relied on a 'broad reach' effort. The Republicans, for example, ran more than 20 unique banners on 35 sites...the Democrats achieved all their exposure with a single banner ad on Yahoo."

The AdRelevance study also reported that Republicans used online marketing tools to build a database of 700,000 names.

2001

2001 saw the emergence of popular political websites such as the Libertarian-leaning Instapundit and liberal community website MyDD. The latter was established by Jerome Armstrong, who would go on to work on Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Armstrong's writing on MyDD also featured one of the first references to the online-based political activism term "netroots."

2002

2002 saw the rise of one of the web's most popular bloggers, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos. Two years later, Moulitsas would be among the first bloggers given press credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

2003

February 2003 saw a tectonic shift in how political campaigns are run, thanks to the rise of Howard Dean and his campaign's use of Meetup to empower supporters to self-organize. The Dean campaign also created a YouTube-like online video site call Dean TV, experimented with SMS, used an online event tool called Get Local, and created a pre-Facebook-style site called Deanlink, among other pioneering innovations.

"We fell into this by accident," Dean told Wired magazine. "I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through Meetup. They built our organization for us before we had an organization."

According to the Wired piece, in February 2003 there were 11 Dean meetings around the country organized through Meetup. By late fall, there were more than 800 monthly meetings on the calendar.

Zephyr Teachout, director of Internet organizing for Dean For America, told me that of all the online tools experimented with and deployed during the campaign, the meeting tool was the most exciting.

"The meeting tool was completely opposed internally when we started designing it in May 2003," she said. "If you ask people what [they] do for a candidate, now I think most people know that they can go to events and get other people to support them whereas 10 years ago it wouldn't even be possible. It's really changed people's sense of possibility in terms of their potential interaction with a campaign."

Another significant technical innovation in 2003 came when Arizona became the first state to implement online voter registration.

2004

2004 saw the launch of the successful Democratic online fundraising outfit ActBlue. The summer of 2004 was also marked by the Rock the Vote campaign that registered an estimated 1.2 million new voters. The campaign included a partnership with Motorola that launched a large-scale mobile political project which enabled people to sign up to receive information on their mobile devices.

That same year, the Washington Times had reported in August that Daily Kos received about 200,000 visitors a day during the Democratic National Convention.

And on September 9, bloggers for the right-leaning site Power Line published a post suggesting Dan Rather's "60 Minutes II" report on George W. Bush's National Guard service included some fraudulent memos. The post and the more than 500 other sites that linked to it are credited with exposing the report and later causing CBS News to apologize, leading to Dan Rather's resignation. Time Magazine named Power Line Blog of the Year.

2005

In early 2005, three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim created YouTube. The popular video sharing site has significantly changed political campaigns, by allowing citizens to post their own video from campaign events, including politicians making faux pas.

By May of 2005 a new site called The Huffington Post was launched by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti that would add a new dynamic to online political coverage.

Today, politicians with blogs are very common, but in 2005 Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston established the first Congressional blog with the help of rising GOP Internet guru David All.

In 2005, another GOP Internet tech star, Patrick Ruffini, the webmaster for the 2000 Bush campaign, launched the highly successful "eCampaign" operation while at the Republican National Committee.

2006

By 2006, political campaigns online were widespread and in full force. In June, one of the first to test out the use of YouTube for their campaign was Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston. He posted a video of what his campaign called Mailtube, an attempt to reach out to constituents through the use of online video.

YouTube started to take hold of the political imagination when, on August 15, 2006, then Sen. George Allen (R-VA) called opposition campaign volunteer S.R. Sidarth "macaca." The video went viral and is seen as a major turning point that led to Allen's electoral defeat.

2006 was also the year that the Rightroots coalition was created to support GOP candidates online. The site raised over $300,000 for different candidates.

2007

Zephyr Teachout said the initial use of most technologies is not where it ends up having an impact. She cites the Dean campaign's use of Meetup and email as examples. Echoing this point, 2007 saw some of the most notable uses of technology in political campaigns. One example is how Barack Obama's team took the social networking suite developed by the Dean campaign to a new level with Blue State Digital's creation of My.BarackObama.com.

Facebook gave rise to an enormous constituency of political activity in 2008, and upstart Twitter dipped its toes in the campaign waters. One of the biggest tech innovations of the year came on July 23, when CNN held the first YouTube Debate for the Democrats in Charleston, S.C. The Dems were followed by the GOP's November 28 YouTube Debate in St. Petersburg, Fla.

2007 also saw an innovative use of distributed online video by Mike Huckabee's campaign for the GOP nomination. Ron Paul, building on Howard Dean's pioneering fundraising efforts, created the money bomb which raised $4.3 million in 24 hours on November 5 largely through online donations. Paul did it again on Dec. 16 when his campaign brought in $6 million in 24 hours, which Fox News called the biggest one-day take ever.

In other 2007 notes, Slatecard was created by David All and Sendhil Panchadsaram as a website that funneled contributions to conservative candidates. All also started the group blog TechRepublican, focusing on the intersection of Republican politics and technology. (In April 2009, TechRepublican was awarded the Golden Dot Award for the Best Blog in National Politics).

Another tech innovation launched in 2007 was the Ustream.tv platform for live online interactive video broadcasts. The technology was been widely used by politicians, including by Barack Obama when he appeared with Oprah during a South Carolina rally which included 74,000 participants.

2008

Supported by online campaigning, the Democrats had a good election year in 2008, taking large majorities in both houses of Congress and celebrating the election of Barack Obama.

Tech innovations played a big role in the election successes of the Dems. One notable highlight was the August 28 text from the Obama campaign:

"Breaking news: the text message is out and it's official... Barack Obama has selected Joe Biden to be his running mate!"

In October 2008, the Obama campaign released its free Obama08 app, which organized a person's iPhone contacts to enable supporters to call friends located in important electoral districts among other features.

While much of the attention in 2008 was on the Democrats, in the spring of 2008 The Next Right was formed as a GOP imitation of the huge left-wing community Daily Kos and MyDD.

In other significant tech innovations, Facebook Connect was launched in July. Connect is a set of APIs from Facebook that enables Facebook members to log onto third-party websites. The release of the API paved the way for the David All Group development of the award winning Act.ivi.st, which integrates with a campaign and sends out messages to the online communities including Facebook and Twitter.

"The idea of web surfing is so dead," All told me. "Once you get people to a website, it's rare they are going to go back too often. But, every single day they are going to be logging into Facebook and they are going to be engaging with that community. So if your news can be liked or commented on and engaged with it is really powerful."

2009

After one of the biggest election years in modern history, in March 2009 New York's 20th congressional district held a special election. Democrat Scott Murphy's successful run was supported by a new tech innovation from Google, the Google Blast Advertising Campaign, which blanketed sites running Google AdSense with Murphy ads targeted to people in his district.

2010

With elections fast approaching, we're bound to see new kinds of tech innovation that will turn heads this year. I recently wrote here on MediaShift about how the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was aided by a smartphone app created for GOP candidates called Walking Edge. It offered Brown's canvassers a database of where undecided voters and supporters live. The app used geo-location tools and Google Maps so that after canvassers made contact with a person, they could update the database in real time.

The Walking Edge falls squarely in what Zephyr Teachout describes as the "data oligarch" model, which is designed to create massive databases. But Teachout said there is also the potneital for the Internet to allow for more civic organizing.

"[The Internet is] one of the greatest collective action problem-solving tools in world history," Teachout said. "These are constantly in tension with each other."

What do you think of the milestones in our list? Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments.

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally, he hosts a current affairs newsmagazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven recently created Exploring Conversations as a multimedia website examining the language of music for his graduate thesis project at Michigan State University.

The biggest player on the smartphone app stage is Apple's iPhone. But the BlackBerry, Android, Palm Pre and other smartphones are likely to play a growing role as well.

The age of political apps began in October 2008 when the Obama campaign released its free Obama08 app. It organized a person's iPhone contacts to enable supporters to call any friends located in important electoral districts. The Obama app also had a donation interface, news feeds, local campaign events, and a list of Obama's positions on major issues.

The impact of the Obama App on the campaign is hard to say. But, as we approach the 2010 midterm elections, other politicians and political groups have developed apps to advance their issues. Below are some app highlights.

Apps for Politicians

A few politicians are already ahead of the app curve. The biggest name on the national stage with an app is Sen. Sam Brownback, who is running for governor of Kansas. The SamForGov app, like Obama08, was developed to engage voters and provide real-time information about the candidate. The same is true for John Kasich's Kasich for Ohio app, which is supporting his Ohio gubernatorial run, and Felton Newell's Newell for Congress app, which was developed to support Newell's campaign for California's 33rd District.

"I've received lots of feedback from people who I run into and I show them the app...that it does really communicate who I am as a person and what my campaign is about," Newell said in a phone interview.

Apps for Keeping up with Congress, White House

Aside from candidate apps, there is a category of apps designed to provide political enthusiasts with a significant amount of Web 2.0 capabilities. At the top of this list is the 99-cent Congress app (also available in Congress+ and Congress Pro upgrades).

Developed by Cohen Research Group, the Congress app is loaded with information on members of the House and the Senate, including photos, office addresses, contact numbers, website links, campaign news, and other details that put users in direct contract with the U.S. Congress.

Another big hitter in this category is the Real Time Congress app, which was developed by Sunlight Labs. Real Time Congress provides users with a number of information feeds related to House and Senate floor debates; a documents feature that provides immediate access to Congressional Budget Office, Congressional Research Service, and Office of Management and Budget documents as they are posted; real-time notices from the Democrat and Republician whips; and hearing schedules, among other features.

Finally, there is the White House app. Released in January by the Obama administration's technology team, it offers users access to information about the White House, from blog updates, video and photos, to news and a live feature with real-time data.

While the app hardly pushes the limits of what advanced smartphones are capable of, the White House app offers something more important in terms of the the "culture of no," which is how Peter Corbett describes the bureaucratic impediments to technological progress in Washington.

Corbett, CEO of the interactive strategy, experiential marketing and content creation solutions company iStrategyLabs, said the White House app is an example for other government agencies to emulate.

"If the White House is using YouTube and building iPhone applications and is using idea sourcing platforms for letting citizens vote on stuff, that's giving all the other agencies permission and an example to follow for when they try and do new things for their constituents," Corbett said.

Apps for Democracy

Corbett and iStrategyLabs are engaged in an emerging category of apps that support open government initiatives. In 2008, Vivek Kundra, former chief technology officer of Washington, DC, and current chief information officer of the U.S. federal government, approached Corbett with a question about how to make the new open government data sets usable for the average citizen.

Corbett responded with the Apps for Democracy contest that offered technologists the potential to win as much as $30,000 in prize money for the development of apps that use the data catalog, and help government function better for citizens. When the contest ended, 47 iPhone, Facebook and web applications had been submitted. iStrategyLabs estimated they are worth more than $2.6 million to Washington.

That contest inspired Sunlight Labs' Apps for America contest and others in Germany, Belgium, Australia and elsewhere. More importantly, Apps for Democracy demonstrated that the technology development crowd has significant interest in participating in these kinds of initiatives.

"We see that there is a passionate local base of technologists that finally see a way to really apply their skills to the process of democracy and government," Corbett said. "Typically they [technologists] were never engaged. They are generally focused on what's going on on TechCrunch and Twitter and not really focused on what's happening on Huffington Post and C-SPAN. Now what we are seeing is because there is this way of tapping into citizen technologists, they are becoming much more engaged in democracy and America itself."

Walking Edge, Ballot Signing App

Technologists are already creating apps that can make an impact in elections and ballot initiatives. The recent election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was aided by an app developed by Republican Web Development. The firm created an app for GOP candidates called Walking Edge. The Atlantic's Chris Good wrote that the app offered canvassers a database of where undecided voters and candidate-supporters live. The app used geo-location tools and Google Maps, and after canvassers made contact with a person they could update the database in real-time.

Another app being developed by the California-based company Verafirma enables users to sign a ballot initiative using an iPhone. It is currently being used by the Citizen Power Campaign to gather signatures for an initiative aimed at prohibiting public employee unions from using member dues for political activities. The app itself is the first time anyone has used a touch-screen phone for gathering signatures.

"The problem with the system today is that if you have a good idea to change California or improve the future of our state, the first question you are asked is do you have $2 million to hire paid signature gatherers to collect signatures to get your initiative on the ballot," Verafirma co-founder Jude Barry said. "We think technology changes that question."

App development has the potential to significantly influence democracy. During the 2008 presidential race, Obama's campaign had a clear edge using technology. Peter Corbett suggests the technology gap for the GOP has now been closed.

"It's an arms race for who can use the most technology the best to either raise funds or to reach constituents," Corbett said.

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs newsmagazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven recently created Exploring Conversations as a multimedia website examining the language of music for his graduate thesis project at Michigan State University.

"It's the time for the group formerly known as the readers to come out and do our part," said Chuck Welch, the editor of Lakeland Local, a citizen journalism site in Lakeland, Fla.

Welch is a former journalist at a local weekly in Louisville who's now a stay-at-home dad. He created Lakeland Local after his wife took a job in Lakeland and the family relocated. Welch wanted to get to know his new city, and soon grew dissatisfied with how the local newspaper, the Ledger (owned by The New York Times Co.), was covering a big story in the area.

"I thought the only way I could ensure that the story was being covered the way I wanted was just to go do it myself," Welch said.

Mobilizing the Community

Paul Roberts, editor of the site Blogging Belmont in Belmont, Mass., has also stepped up to cover and mobilize his community. He recently used Facebook and Twitter in tandem with his blog to get people to the polls in support of a debt exclusion school funding measure.

"[The voter drive] got us some media attention, which was helpful in creating awareness about what was happening," Roberts said. "The exclusion passed by a wide margin. I don't think the social networking piece was decisive, but they are powerful tools."

Roberts, like Welch, is a former journalist. He currently works at a technology analyst firm, and was recently elected to serve as a school committee member. He created Blogging Belmont to establish a source of real-time information about everything that's going on in the Belmont political sphere, and as a resource for a community where the local media is comprised of a single two-person newspaper.

Roberts said he would like to integrate technologies with Blogging Belmont that allow visitors to the site to use their Facebook or Twitter account to log-in, making it easier to participate.

"There is a huge amount of potential there, but as of yet, my integration between the blog and other media are pretty loose," Roberts said. "I talk to a lot of folks that are pretty frequent readers of the blog and they are still trying to wrap their brain around what Twitter is and why it exists. So I'm not sure the urgent need is there to build the bridges to Facebook and Twitter as it might be if my audience was different."

Political Leaders Taking Notice

Technology is making citizen journalism easier, but of course there is currently little, if any, money in covering local government. Without any financial incentive, how do you get the average citizen to spend their time live blogging or sending out tweets during a public meeting? And unlike the inclination to tweet about an accident on the highway, school board and city council meetings just aren't that sexy, despite their importance.

"I think that it is good for a democracy, but the trouble is that it is an awful waste of time and there's not a whole lot of ways to pay for it," said Tommy Duncan, a Tampa, Fla. blogger and editor of Sticks of Fire. "Live blogging would probably be helpful in many cases, but I don't know if it can be justified financially."

There is some reward in the fact that politicians are beginning to notice the presence of local bloggers. Cincinnati Councilman Chris Bortz said citizen journalists can offer communities additional access to political leaders.

"I know a few of the bloggers fairly well and it's nice because it is a good source for me as well," Bortz said. "If I feel like I'd like to get something out and maybe it's too difficult to get in the local paper, I can often email the bloggers and ask them if I can post a guest blog, and they are often eager to do it."

Perhaps the biggest potential for citizen journalists who are focused on local government is the interactivity promised by Twitter or Facebook. They can receive instant feedback and encouragement from readers and fellow citizens.

"I've gotten questions from the readers because they might have more experience or they might have an insight that I didn't have," Chuck Welch said. "In the past it was thought that a story had to be completely finished before you printed it in the newspaper. Today you put the information out there and you update and add to it as you learn more. News is a process. You put it out there and let the audience help you build on it. It's more fun to work back and forth with the readers."

He said the end result is that local government officials know they're still being held accountable.

"I think there are cases now where city council or city staff might be more cognizant that just because the newspaper reporter is not in the room it doesn't mean the community is not going to learn about whatever it is they are doing," Welch said.

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs news magazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven recently created Exploring Conversations as a multimedia website examining the language of music for his graduate thesis project at Michigan State University.

Beyond becoming tools for leaking information, experts also say these new platforms, which are easy to use and encourage brevity, could help change the way government communicates with citizens.

Mark Drapeau, co-chair of the Gov 2.0 Expo and adjunct professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, suggested recently that government agencies could use Posterous to open up government in significant ways.

"Good information can be hard to find...New media technologies like Posterous blogs don't directly change that, but if they become a 'gateway page' for getting people interested in a topic and then driving them to the 'hardcore stuff' on a .gov website, then that's a huge indirect value," Drapeau wrote in an email.

As an example, Drapeau suggested that when a lengthy jobs report is released on a .gov website, someone from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should blog about it in a short, casual post of roughly 500 words. That could inspire curiosity, which would cause people to follow a link to the more detailed report.

"It's a marketing tool and it's a community relations tool as well," Drapeau said.

The Promise of Posterous

The simple email-to-blog-post functionality of Posterous is making it an increasingly popular tool for people. (While Tumblr also offers email posting functionality and limited auto-posting features, the ability to sync Posterous directly to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other accounts gives it a clear edge, according to Jennifer Van Grove.*)

"You can do more than a tweet and get out more information, and there is no delay in that happening," said Jennifer Van Grove, associate editor of the widely read social media blog Mashable.

Van Grove recently wrote a thorough comparison of Tumblr and Posterous. She suggested that while Tumblr's web interface is "killer," it is the ease of sending an email to publish on Posterous that makes the service truly innovative.

"I'll take a picture and just email it to my Posterous account, which takes literally 10 seconds and it is already up," Van Grove said in a phone interview. "And, it will auto-post out to Twitter and Facebook ... [there is] a potential for an instant mass communication."

Government IT teams have their hands full, thanks to the rapid pace of new media innovation. They can't make all of the latest, greatest tools and services available internally, which can hamper transparency efforts. But the availability of these outside services can help continue the march toward government openness and transparency, whether IT teams and policymakers like it or not.

Government Could be Educational

Clay Johnson is director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on government transparency. He said that government IT teams aren't able to control what employees can and can't use.

"New stuff gets invented everyday," Johnson said. "It seems like things [such as the blocking of certain websites] are fairly easy to circumvent."

Johnson suggested that government agencies should take a more proactive approach if they don't want sensitive information published on blogs.

"The government would be in a better spot if it were being educational rather than being restrictive," Johnson said. "If you educate rather than restrict, I think they'll have better results."

Johnson praised Posterous and Tumblr as "cheap and easy" in comparison to websites like recovery.gov, which was designed to communicate how stimulus funds are being spent. That site cost about $9.5 million to create. Johnson said simple blogging platforms are best used to inspire participation and collaboration with government.

A Different View

David Moore, executive director of the Participatory Politics Foundation said in a phone interview that commercial services like Tumblr offer the illusion of transparency and engagement with government, but they are not a good solution for the long term.

The Participatory Politics Foundation, with help from the Sunlight Foundation, created OpenCongress, an open-source website that aggregates government data and provides news coverage, blog posts and commenting functionality. Moore suggested that it's a good thing for government agencies to dabble in new media technologies, but it's dangerous for them to get entrenched in them because these services are not truly open.

"They look really great at first and you say, 'Okay now the government is getting involved, they are out where people are,'" Moore said. "What's necessary is that government always publishes their source data first in ways that are fully compliant with fully open principles. Then after that, they can delve into social networking tools and blogging platforms like Tumblr."

Moore views Posterous and Tumblr as "walled gardens," and is skeptical of any footprint government agencies establish in closed proprietary services.

"As a society, we don't want to have to rely on the Pentagon Papers model of keeping the government accountable," Moore said. "If you were designing a system, no one would say that having someone leak something is ideal. Rather, if you step back and redesign how government can and should work in the 21st century, people would say that all public data be released publicly and from a primary source...so that they can give their feedback throughout the process."

*Editor's Note: The sentence comparing the email-to-blog-post functionality of Posterous and Tumblr was added on December 15 in order to provide additional context, and to respond to this comment.

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs news magazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven is a second year graduate student at Michigan State University in the School of Journalism.

During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the basis for a mailer that was sent to homes in the district. The mailer presented Pleitez as a partier, drinker and womanizer, among other smears.

Pleitez admits the negative attack probably cost him some votes. However, instead of shying away from the photos, Pleitez said in a phone interview that he used the incident to reinforce the transparency of his campaign.

"I didn't take any pictures down," Pleitez said. "Everything is up on Facebook. If anyone questioned me after, I invited them to my Facebook page so we could go one by one through all my pictures and I could explain where I was and what I was doing. I have nothing to hide."

Social Media's Influence on Politics

Pleitez didn't win the election, and neither did Cedillo. But their race, and its use of Facebook photos, is yet another example of how social media profiles are increasingly becoming a major part of the political process.

Political candidates used to hide embarrassing photos in a shoebox in the closet. But many of today's younger candidates came of age with social media technologies. As a result, their large online footprint -- replete with status updates, videos and photographs -- often becomes a political football.

"It is astounding and sort of scary the amount of information that is out there now," Claire Viall, president of the Cal Berkeley Democrats at UC Berkeley, said in a phone interview. "But it doesn't prohibit anybody from using social media. It's become a part of our lives."

Viall, 21, joined Facebook when she was in high school as a way to interact with friends before heading off to college. She said that while there are some privacy controls on who can see her profile, it's really a false sense of control because anybody can post just about anything they want about people on the Internet.

Social media technologies have made it very easy to publish -- and find -- embarrassing photos online. C.J. Pascoe of the Digital Youth Research project at Berkeley suggested that young people are more willing to put personal information online because they are exposed to social media at a very early age. This can have big implications for those who aspire to political office.

The Election of Audra Shay

In July, Audra Shay ran for chairman of the Young Republicans, a Republican Party organization for 18- to 40-year olds. During her campaign Shay, 38, was accused of endorsing racism as a result of a reply she posted on her Facebook wall. When the story went viral in the blogosphere, Shay immediately scrubbed her Facebook page clean of other potentially damaging items. (She ended up winning the chairmanship.)

Tommy Jardon, executive director of the College Republican National Committee, called the incident a perfect example of how anything posted online can get picked up and sent around the Internet.

"Someone took a screen shot and even though you take it down or delete it, it now lives forever," Jardon said in a phone interview.

Running for a national organization seat is certainly different than running for Congress, because the Young Republicans, like any similar group, is governed by internal politics. The public at-large does not have a say. Overall, Jardon, 25, suggested that what young people post online should be considered in context.

"What you did in college or what you did five years ago or even five minutes ago, all has some context and an explanation and merits one interpretation or another," Jardon said. "The glory of it is that it is still up to the voters to decide."

Becoming a Public Figure

At age 19, Jason Overman was elected to the city of Berkeley, Calif.'s Rent Stabilization Board in 2004, and in 2006 led an unsuccessful campaign for a city council seat. He said that young people considering a life in politics need to recognize that running for office is a choice to become a public figure. They should therefore be cognizant that what they post online is public.

"I think there is a fear of what is going to pop up, but I think it is sort of akin to a fear that anyone has in an elected office," Overman said. "It's the same sort of fear that older politicians would have had every morning opening the newspaper. I think that's just sort of a part of public life."

It may be just a matter of time until social media is widely understood and accepted outside of young generations who consider being online as second nature. Emanuel Pleitez, now a special assistant to President Obama's economic advisory board at the U.S. Treasury Department, said that, despite the way his Facebook photos were exploited in his last campaign, he would still like to run again. For him, the attack was akin to being baptized by fire -- and that people running for office have always been targeted.

"If I were to advise future political candidates, I would say don't be afraid of what's on Facebook, and don't be so paranoid," Pleitez said. "Just be aware and be ready. It's better to be transparent, open and humble about whatever your past is than it is to hide things."

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs news magazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven is a second year graduate student at Michigan State University in the School of Journalism. His research has covered news media bias and framing issues, censorship during war, urban revitalization, renewable energy and climate change.

"[Social media] allows me to gives my thoughts on the events of the day and the complete text of my comments from speeches and stuff that I give that the mainstream media might not normally cover," said Francis Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, in a phone interview.

Slay, who was recently elected to his third term, has been blogging and using social media such as Twitter for years. Tony Messenger, Missouri state Capital political reporter and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote in a recent email that Slay is a "consistent user, he gets his message out, and he also has fun with it. He doesn't just regurgitate talking points or news releases. Mostly, he uses the social media how it was intended, as interaction."

Slay says new media technologies made it possible to publish his policy positions and get his message out. "It does help me communicate better...it really engages my constituents and people that have a stake in the city," Slay said.

The Internet has leveled the playing field for political communication. Now, thanks in large part to social media, a growing number of people are going directly to the political source to get the latest information.

Mainstream Media's Value?

Alexandra Samuel, an Internet researcher and CEO of social media consulting company Social Signal, says there are lots of examples of important investigative reporting. But during a recent phone interview Samuel said it's only a small fraction of what's produced by the mainstream media.

"Mostly what you read in newspapers feels like press releases," Samuel said. "So can that be replaced? Yeah, that can totally be replaced. Why should I as a politician or political organization rely on some respectable news organization to essentially rewrite my press release and print it in their newspaper when I can send that same information directly to my constituents? There is not really much value added."

Jake Wagman, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who covers St. Louis City Hall, said in a phone interview it's helpful that Mayor Slay uses his blog to get his message out or send out tweets. He says as a journalist he can see what the mayor is up to whether it is big or small.

Perhaps more important, new media technologies leave an online record that is searchable by interested citizens and by journalists. However, Wagman said that you can't interview a blog post.

"During an interview the mayor will say things more off the cuff which is usually what's most revealing," Wagman said. "Using social media he doesn't have to endure the give and take and can stay on message."

Objectivity and Watchdog Role Important

Despite the exponential growth of social media technologies, and the declining profit margins for some mainstream media, a large majority of people in the United States still prefer to get their political news from television.

Jeremy Hanson, communications director for Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, said in a phone interview that there is still a need for objective news media.

"It's very handy for candidates and elected officials to be able to communicate directly to voters or their constituents ... (but) people shouldn't be forced to rely solely on information they get directly from politicians," Hanson said.

It's important in a healthy political environment for journalism to maintain its core functions to inform the public and keep a critical eye on government. But with the direct access politicians now have, is the mainstream media becoming irrelevant?

Columnist Tony Messenger wrote in an email that social media sometimes does scoop the mainstream media but Twitter and Facebook have actually increased the opportunities for reporters and politicians to interact.

"That can be a good thing for both of us," Messenger said. "Using direct messages, with (Mayor) Slay and others, I've gained a better understanding of stories and instant access when it otherwise might not have been granted."

It has become much easier for politicians to build a website with social media tools and other interactive capabilities. Most websites for politicians will feature a news section which looks and reads like content you might find in the local paper. There is just one important caveat: The sites are generally paid for by political campaigns and are likely to ensure the politicians remain in a positive light. Despite being free services, the same could be said about updates on Facebook or tweets sent out by politicians.

Reporter Jake Wagman calls Mayor Slay's website a "24/7 campaign site."

"I would hope people recognize it as a campaign-funded website," Wagman said. "I don't know if the causal reader recognizes that, but I think news consumers are pretty savvy."

Wagman suggested that with as many information sources now available online people will go to multiple places to find out what's happening in their city. But, Wagman said "it is incumbent upon traditional news media sources to provide information that readers want to see so they will still want to come to us."

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs news magazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven is a second year graduate student at Michigan State University in the School of Journalism. His research has covered news media bias and framing issues, censorship during war, urban revitalization, renewable energy and climate change.

At the national level, social media has been embraced by many politicians. Even the White House has a Twitter account and Flickr feed. But is the same true of local campaigns and politicians? How much are Facebook, MySpace and Twitter being integrated into the communication strategies of local political campaigns?

"We look at it as a way to get a message to our constituents and in a campaign to potential voters," said Mesa, Arizona mayor Scott Smith in a phone interview.

Smith, who was elected to office in May 2008, said his use of social media is a critical component in engaging his constituents. Mesa is a city of more than 463,000 people, yet this community, located roughly 20 miles from Phoenix, is without its own newspaper or local TV news outlet.

"It's not just the rise in social media, it's the change in more traditional sources [of information]," Smith said. "And for a city our size that shares newspapers with an adjoining city and doesn't have access to more formal and traditional forms of media, social networking has become essential because in many ways it's not only the best way of getting things out, it's the only way to get your message out."

The decline of local journalism

Smith's community isn't the only smaller city or town to find itself suffering form a lack of local press. While the New York City mayoral election attracts interest from the New York Times, elsewhere the media landscape has changed drastically, thanks to the shuttering of smaller newspapers that were traditionally the source of local political coverage. In some places, social media is being used to try and replace some of what has been lost in terms of professional reporting.

"As money becomes tighter as traditional media outlets become either non-existent or more and more restrictive to how much they cover and the scope of their coverage, I think social media is going to play an increasingly important role in local campaigns because they are all we have," Smith said.

For Boulder, Colo., city council candidate KC Becker, social media technologies like Facebook have become an essential part of her campaign. However, Becker does admit to having some trouble figuring out how to use Twitter.

"I didn't get on Twitter until I decided to run and honestly it has been the technology that still eludes me a little bit," Becker said in a phone interview. "It should be a good outlet for a political candidate, but I just find it a little bit overwhelming and a little bit harder to use."

Some mayors, like Cory Booker of Newark, N.J., have set the bar high with their use of Twitter. Booker has more than 757,000 followers and has engaged his followers by tweeting everything from local policy initiatives to old proverbs.

Lansing, Mich., mayor Virg Bernero, who is running for re-election in November, uses his tweets to promote appearances on Fox and CNN. Bernero campaign manager Patrick McAlvey says occasionally the tweets or videos have gone viral and have been reposted in a number of avenues outside of the Lansing constituency.

"To some extent some things have caught more attention or have been retweeted more often," McAlvey said in a phone interview. "Some of it has to do with the size of our market, but some videos have gone viral."

A Cultural Shift in the Media Landscape

The 2008 presidential campaign was a watershed moment for new media technology. West Hartford, Conn., mayor Scott Slifka says years ago during his previous mayoral campaigns, the only people using Facebook were almost exclusively in their 20s. But Slifka, who is in the heat of his own re-election bid, says there has been a quantum leap in the number of people of all ages logging in to social media. This has had an impact on how political messages spread.

"The thing that strikes me is how rapid new media technologies are," Slifka said. "In a smaller community like ours [about 61,000 people] where the government may not be one that is full-time...you are used to moving at a slightly slower pace. It was really the pace of the printed newspaper."

Slifka said that if there were three or four newspaper stories about local politics in one week, it was significant. Now, news and rumors spread instantly through the blogosphere and are shared on social networks. Local politicians are not just dealing with a new story in the paper -- they are dealing with the fallout from it around the clock.

"I think most local governments aren't really equipped for that kind of rapid response," Slifka said.

Perhaps most significant to the evolving shift in local political communication is the sense that social media is starting to fill the void left by downsized news staffs or the complete absence of journalists in smaller communities.

"A newspaper article gives you such a shallow understanding of the events that occurred at City Hall," said recently elected Tuscaloosa, Ala., mayor Walter Maddox. "A television story is 30 seconds if you are lucky. Through our website, through Facebook, through MySpace and Twitter, we can provide a more detailed and compelling message to the voters of why we are making a certain policy decision.

Maddox said it is important not to post "bureaucratic mumbo jumbo" online because it loses local interest. He said the potential communication capabilities of social media are causing his new government to revamp its online presence.

"It's literally a town hall opportunity to communicate with people," he said. "And they get an opportunity to communicate back with you. That's why it's important and that's why it's going to continue being important."

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs news magazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven is a second year graduate student at Michigan State University in the School of Journalism. His research has covered news media bias and framing issues, censorship during war, urban revitalization, renewable energy and climate change.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that for the first time a majority (55 percent) of voting-age adults engaged with politics online during the 2008 presidential election.

"In each consecutive, comparable election season since we've started conducting surveys, we've seen that reliance on the Internet and that use of the Internet for political purposes, it never goes down, it always goes up," Pew research specialist Aaron Smith said in a phone interview. "I think the trend is fairly clear."

The Activist Culture Online

While television remains the primary vehicle to get a political message to the largest audience, it is also a passive creature. The boob-tube got its nickname for good reason: you turn it on and watch. It's a one way street.

The Internet is a different beast altogether. The development of advanced tools and online services has made it easy to get information, interact with other people, and share opinions, all of which are important when it comes to politics. The number of people using online social networks like Facebook and Twitter continues to grow exponentially. The Internet is a fantastic medium for participation, and the Pew research suggests that people want to use it to engage with politics.

"One of the things we clearly saw in the research is this ... growth of a participatory culture or an activist type mentality that really has sort of taken root online," Smith said. "[It] really is based on that unique ability that the Internet offers to not just receive information, but to put something of yourself out there and really interact with the information you find and other people that are out there that are interested in the same topics."

The activist mentality percolating on the Internet has caused another, perhaps less positive trend. When examining online political discourse, you often find people using First Amendment rights to advance ideas from the radical fringes.

Smith said that for the first time the Pew data shows that people admit they go online to get information that agrees with their existing viewpoint. To a certain extent, this changes the relationship people have with news.

"They are not dispassionately weighing the evidence about two candidates to see which one they agree with -- they are coming to the debate with pre-existing views," Smith said. "When they go online for news they want to know what's going on with their candidate. They want to know, almost like a sports mentality, what the score is, what happened today? How does it affect my team?"

As a result, the doomsday scenario that the Internet might create a so-called echo chamber online continues to be debated (see this piece by Brooke Gladstone at On the Media for background). But aside from that, two specific questions bubble to the surface: how long until the Internet is more important than television for politics? Will cable news one day suffer the same fate as newspapers?.

So long CNN

Todd Mundt, a blogger and vice president and chief content officer at Louisville Public Media, decided in May 2008 to cut the coaxial cable to his house and say so long to CNN.

In an ongoing experiment, the Mundt household is living in a world where online video and over-the-air broadcast television is the norm. Beyond a few hiccups here and there, Mundt says his consumption of political content has been uninterrupted. He also has access to breaking news.

"At local news stations where something big happens in their area, even though they don't do it everyday, they fire up the live stream and just start sending live continuous coverage online," Mundt said. "Like when Michael Jackson died. the first thing that I did when I heard he died was I went ABC 7 in Los Angeles and they were streaming live and continuous. Then I went to CBS 2 and the same thing was happening there. The only ones that weren't streaming coverage online were CNN and some of the other major networks, but I got it from local stations."

Mundt is certainly not sheltered from the news in any way -- he hosts NPR's Morning Edition -- but he's found that where he once used to flip through TV channels (what he calls "grazing"), he now doesn't engage in the same kind of activity online. In his post-cable news home, political content is on-demand. That means he by and large sticks to his chosen sources, which reinforces the recent Pew data.

"I don't know that I'm avoiding anything that I don't want to see, but I certainly have chosen particular sources and I've chosen them for what I think are good reasons," Mundt said. "But I am just not exposed to a wide variety of stuff. Even being exposed to CNN when it is at its goofiest is sometimes good just to see what people are talking about."

There is an argument that suggests serendipity is involved in reading a newspaper because people can stumble onto a story they wouldn't normally have chosen to read. Perhaps the same can be said for someone who flips through cable news channels at random. But if the Pew data is correct, then a shift towards Internet-based, on-demand news consumption could possibly lead to an increase in the polarization of political discourse. (Of course, there are others that suggest the Web is in fact the "best serendipity doo-dah ever invented.")

At the moment, the Internet has a long way to go to catch up to television as the main source for political content. "Clearly television is the dominant mode of political discourse in this country," Pew's Smith said.

However, the segment of the population that most widely relies on the Internet for political content is people under the age of 30, and they will eventually become the majority.

What's the suggestion? Social media technologies like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter must be thoroughly engaged by civilian and military personnel at DoD in a new era of personal communication. That's what Price Floyd, the Pentagon's new principal deputy assistant secretary of public affairs, told me in a recent phone interview.

"There is no more powerful voice than a young officer or a young enlisted man or woman talking about what it is like to serve their country," said Floyd. "That's the most powerful communicator we can have. Likewise, if we can reach out to our people overseas...posted at bases around the world to discuss policies that we may have or misunderstandings that may arise, those people need to communicate in the ways the people communicate today."

Included in the DoD ranks already using social media are Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen (who has 5,652 Twitter followers and 2,552 Facebook fans) and Commander Adm. James, head of European Command (who has 3,515 Twitter followers and 906 Facebook fans), among others.

"There are thousands of social networking sites that people in the military or civilians at DoD use and take part in everyday," said Floyd, who has 909 Twitter followers and 4,756 Facebook fans.

Banning Social Media Sites

Despite what appears to be a Pentagon embrace of tweeting and status updates, recent reports suggest the military is planning a widespread ban on social media websites.

Leading the charge is the Marine Corps which announced August 9 a ban on social networking sites on the Defense Department's unclassified network, the enterprise network (NIRRNET), citing security concerns about cyber-threats such as hackers.

Additionally, recent reports from Noah Shachtman at Wired.com suggest that a military-wide ban on social networks may be a certainty.

Floyd acknowledges that there are security risks by allowing Pentagon staffers and soldiers in the field access to social media networks. But, he says that if releasing sensitive information on a postcard or letter is against policy, tweeting the information isn't any different.

"We need to have continued education and training of people on these sites and remind them that just because they are on Facebook or Twitter, that operational security still matters and still needs to be followed," Floyd said.

When asked if the Marine Corps ban on social media sites was a mistake, Floyd said that a policy is currently being crafted on how Defense Department personnel should approach social media and other new technologies. The recommendations from the report are expected to become a department-wide policy by mid-September which could mean the Marine Corps ban may be lifted.

"There should be a consistent policy implemented across the board so you don't have the kind of haphazard use of these technologies that we currently have," Floyd said.

Secretary Gates' apparent push for better communication is part of an effort to encourage feedback not only from the American public and around the world, but also from within the Pentagon. Floyd's hope is that use of social media networks could even have an effect on DoD policy.

The Godmother of Innovation

Across the beltway at Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has all her lines in the social media waters. The brains behind Clinton's aggressive push for innovation at State is Alec Ross who has been appointed the senior adviser on innovation.

Ross, who worked on then-Senator Barack Obama's campaign helping to craft tech policy, is pioneering what he calls 21st century statecraft at the State Department.

Essentially the idea behind 21st century statecraft is expanding the traditional dominion of diplomacy from government to government to also include a more citizen-centered form of engagement such Obama's speech in Cairo where he was speaking not just to Arab governments but directly to Muslim people.

Ross calls Secretary Clinton the "godmother of technology and 21st century statecraft." He says social media is a messy place and that with modern technologies you don't know what's going to work, but that taking risks is essential to meeting diplomatic and development goals.

"The larger issues and more important issues in my mind are to commit to using social media tools," Ross said in a phone interview. "Not as something that's cute or has a gee-whiz factor to it, but as an everyday instrument in our diplomatic practice."

The State Department appears to be engaging with Web 2.0 and is neck deep in the social media world with more than 13,000 Facebook fans as well as more than 7,500 Twitter followers. For Secretary Clinton's current trip through Africa, you can send her a direct text message with questions or comments that are being answered by Clinton.

Losing Command and Control

As with the Defense Department, State is attempting to empower staffers and diplomats to use new web-based innovations. This comes with risks.

The recent reports about 27-year-old State Department official Jared Cohen emailing Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey asking for a delay of Twitter's scheduled maintenance over concerns that it might silence protests in Iran ignited a small controversy.

Ross says that engaging social media involves quick decision-making and that you have to trust people.

"The kind of command and control that we were able insist on during the Cold War cannot and does not exist in the 21st century," Ross said. "Where analyzing a very small number of resources and controlling messaging toward a very small number of media sources; point-in-fact there are millions of consumers and media outlets across multiple platforms...You've got to trust in the State Dept. professionals who are here to do their job rather than just taking instructions and sort of zombie-like motions of saying exactly that which was dictated to them from on high."

While the military is contemplating a ban on social media and working out a policy to guide an overall DoD approach, Ross is pushing an approach at State that has more to do with coaching. He says that any policy set in stone pertaining to new technologies like social media will quickly become irrelevant and out of date.

"If you just say from on-high 'thou shalt A-B-C when using technology and social media,' you're going to be irrelevant and out of date in about 30 minutes," Ross said.

Steven Davy is a freelance journalist, and freelance radio reporter/producer. He regularly covers the defense industry and security related issues for UPI. Additionally he hosts a current affairs news magazine radio show called the Nonchalant Café Hour which broadcasts live in Kalamazoo, Mich. Steven is a second year graduate student at Michigan State University in the School of Journalism. His research has covered news media bias and framing issues, censorship during war, urban revitalization, renewable energy and climate change.