Factcheck.org: Born in the U.S.A. | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008

All the President’s Tweets
N’Gai Croal 2/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
During the 2008 presidential race, one of the oft-cited feathers in the Obama campaign's cap was its Internet arm. From his unexpected win at the Iowa caucuses to his unprecedented field operation, the heart of the new president's machine was MyBarackObama.com. The brainchild of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the site allowed Obama supporters to register for information updates, plan events, become part of local groups, sign in at the site's virtual phone bank to make canvassing calls, and create individual fundraising pages. On top of that, his team took full advantage of existing social networking tools: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. By the time Election Day rolled around, more than a million people had signed up at MyBarackObama.com, and nearly half of the record-breaking contributions to the campaign were donated in discrete amounts of $200 or less.
GLOBAL POWER ELITE
The Web Masters
Barrett Sheridan 12/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
Think of 2008 as the year the Internet got greedy. As the recession goes digital, it's no longer enough to have an easy-to-use social-networking site, or blog software that corners the market on 13-year-olds. Now, companies like Facebook and Twitter are betting their futures on the proposition that it's time to become a hub, a place from which all other Internet activities stem. In creating our list of the men and women leading the Web, we looked to those who've courted customers and held on: Hulu.com is keeping viewers glued to television without the TV set. Facebook's new Connect platform lets users monitor what their friends are doing online. InterActiveCorp (IAC) is defining what it means to invest and succeed online; the Daily Beast, Tina Brown's news aggregator, is a favorite of journalists and bloggers alike. Meanwhile, former IAC execs are climbing the Washington ranks. Here's who succeeded the most:
ONLINE
Ms. Popularity
Barrett Sheridan 12/10/2008 12:00:00 AM
Google serves up several billion search queries every single day, giving it incredible insight into what people are thinking and talking about. On Wednesday, the Internet giant released its year-end Zeitgeist report, which lists the most popular search terms of 2008 by country and topic. It also calculates the fastest risers and queries that have catapulted in popularity within the last year. Here's a rundown of the most interesting insights from this year's report.
TECHNOLOGY
President 2.0
Daniel Lyons 11/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama is the first major politician who really "gets" the Internet. Sure, Howard Dean used the Web to raise money. But Obama used it to build an army. And now, that army of digital kids expects to stick around and help him govern. Crowd-sourced online brainstorming sessions? Web sites where regular folks hash out policy ideas and vote yea or nay online? A new government computer infrastructure that lets people get a look into the workings of Washington, including where the money flows and how decisions get made? Yes to all those and more. "This was not just an election—this was a social movement," says Don Tapscott, author of "Grown Up Digital," which chronicles the lives of 20-somethings raised on computers and the Web. "I'm convinced," Tapscott says, "that we're in the early days of fundamental change in the nature of democracy itself."
CAMPAIGN 2008
The Big Picture
Jessica Ramirez 11/10/2008 12:00:00 AM
In the hours before President George W. Bush was set to give his final State of the Union message last January, Sen. Barack Obama was already preparing his response. His campaign wasn't planning a press conference or appearances on network news. Instead, they shot and uploaded video of the democratic presidential candidate's comments onto the only site that could rival primetime power—Youtube.
TECHTONIC SHIFTS
Open Wide …
Barrett Sheridan 10/25/2008 12:00:00 AM
As the U.S. Presidential debates have shown, Barack Obama and John McCain can't agree on much. One rare exception: electronic health records. Obama has proposed spending $50 billion to help doctors and hospitals digitize their files and build patient databases. McCain agrees that electronic recordkeeping could lower costs and save lives—say, by helping doctors more easily recognize which patients are on dangerous drug combinations. Their proposals are part of a larger trend to bring the U.S. medical system, which still runs on paper and pens rather than bits and bytes, into the 21st century. Many businesses, from IBM to Procter & Gamble, have embraced the Web 2.0 ideals of transparency and decentralized problem-solving—what technologists call "open source." But is it a good idea to apply those values to private health matters? Some Web-savvy health-care practitioners are coming to the view that making data about your health freely available to family, friends and doctors could enhance the quality of care.