Obama and Wikipedia

As many people have said in their posts the main similarity between Obama and Wikipedia is that both of their success depends on individuals.  These individuals are not elitist scholars or professional politicians or campaign managers.  They are everyday people, and they take it upon themselves to provide and give whatever they can.  Both Wikipedia and Obama's campaign relies on people feeling that they have some power, that they can make a difference no matter how small.  Both also must trust the "volunteers" to provide correct information and other's who use it to check and fix anything that shouldn't be there.  Here is an example of this, it's a screen shot of Obama's wikipedia page on September 23rd at 10:14 PST.  It was removed by 10:39 the same day (be warned there is some derogatory and just plain rude language used).  It took just 25 minutes for this to be edited away, a sign of how those participating online are peer censoring sites like Wikipedia.  Obama's campaign had volunteers checking each other as well, to make sure data was accurate and the campaign continued the way it was planned.

I thought this blog post from the New York Times explained a lot about how the Internet and every other new technology is changing politics.  The Internet allowed for Obama to organize thousands of people for all different purposes.  Advertisements on YouTube which may in the years before have been missed because they were on the far end of the long tail, became Obama's greatest advantage in the media.  "Those videos were more effective than television ads because viewers chose to watch them... The campaign's official stuff they created for You TUbe was watched for 14.5 million hours.  To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million" (Miller).  This is a great example of not only the effect of the long tail, but also convergence.  Political ads on television are no longer effective alone, they show up on YouTube along with the hundreds of others that are shown for free.