Content Matters: Election 2008

In 2004, Howard Dean gained attention for leveraging the Internet in his presidential campaign. Dean's use was primarily for fundraising, though he also dabbled with the use of a blog.
In 2006, liberal bloggers like DailyKos played a huge role in helping Ned Lamont gain the credibility and support to knock off Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Joe later won the general election as an independent, but clearly the bloggers got noticed.
For 2008, all of the candidates are trying to show themselves as being "web enabled". Barack Obama and Hillary each used their websites for their announcements and virtually all the candidates have created MySpace pages.
Unfortunately, none of the candidates in either party have yet shown the ability to truly leverage any web 2.0 capabilities. Hilary simply used the web to reply to a set of screened emails; it was simply website as a proxy for a TV appearance.
A new site, TechPresident, focuses on how candidates are using the Web and what the web is saying about the candidates. A product of the Personal Democracy Forum, TechPresident includes a number of contributing blogger/writers from across the political and editorial spectrum.
On the site, you can see how many MySpace friends each of the candidates has (the Democrats are doing fairly well among this constituency, many of whom are too young to vote) and see flickr feeds of citizen photojournalists.
Despite a few early hiccups (like Amanda Marcotte, the blogger who resigned from the Edwards campaign) the campaigns seem to have a wide-eyed, almost naive view of the Internet. It will be interesting to see how they respond when their actions (via video or in writing) are used against them on the Web, such as on the Real McCain site.
Overall, my hope is that we see one or more of the candidates really embrace the web as a significant part of their communications efforts. Web 2.0 makes the Internet a two-way communications platform. While there are risks to that model, there could be tremendous opportunity for the candidate who embraces it.