The Orange Chair

The nytimes.com has an excellent article on how Barack Obama uses the Internet and specifically social computing to be a highly effective candidate for the position of President of the United States. This article has many good examples of how he is going about things differently (i.e. in a Web 2.0 way) than his Web 1.0-based opponents. To me, this is a key quote:

‘ Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.” ‘

Enterprises could learn alot from his team’s approach, regardless of which candidate they support. See the article here:The Nation - The Wiki-Way to the Nomination - NYTimes.com

Obama everywhere, indeed.

According to this article in the globeandmail.com, MySpace plans redesign for next week

This is big news in that it is coming on the heels of announcements of facebook to change the design of it’s site too. And while you may think that MySpace is for kids…

” with about 110 million users worldwide, claims to be the most trafficked website in the United States, adding that about 300,000 people sign up each day.”

That’s big traffic, and big business. See the article and expect more developments on this story.