Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton is the first time an insurgent has beaten the establishment candidate in the Democratic primaries since Jimmy Carter in 1976. This is interesting and important for all kinds of reasons. One, as I've written before, is that it suggests that the era of Big Money and Big Media pre-selecting the nominee of the Democratic party may well be over, in no small part because of the affordances brought by the internet: lower costs of communication and collaboration, and less allowances for hypocrisy and dishonesty in campaigns.

But there's another big reason why Obama's victory is so important. He is riding herd on the largest and most potent new political organization anyone has seen on the American landscape in at least sixteen years. He's probably got anywhere from four to eight million email addresses on top of his 1.5 million donors and 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking site.

What happens with this organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? For a website that is focused on how the candidates are using the web, and the web is using them, by the time November rolls around, this could be the billion-dollar question.

This isn't the first time this question has arisen in modern American politics, by the way. And usually the answer is "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss." It's just that the internet should force us to think about the possibilities of a different answer. Not only that, I think Obama is thinking about a different answer.

More reporting from the front lines of academic research on politics and the internet: Now I'm sitting in on a panel with presentations on the connections between the Dean campaign and the New Left (no, he didn't slum with the Weathermen); John Kerry's innovative (!) use of the web post-2004; and Italian firebrand and antipolitician extraordinaire, Beppe Grillo.

Glenn Greenwald gives respect to Ron Paul and considers a comparison with Howard Dean; Danny Glover makes another comparison, this time to Ross Perot, warning that Paul may started getting similarly hounded in the press; Fred Thompson suggests that he won't be president after all; blogger Craig Stoltz gets excited over the New York Times' Debate Analyzer; a new section of Fred Thompson's website seems strangely underdone; and Mitt Romney ads are showing up on Gay.com. Way!

Newt Gingrich is advising Fred Thompson to use video when, or if, he announces; asking if the Internet really matters in election politics; Barack Obama launches Generation Obama; and Obama, Sam Brownback, and Ron Paul are the only candidates to support an act that would create "a kind of Google for the federal government";

Howard Dean on "the most extraordinary invention for empowering ordinary people since the invention of the printing press: ....speaking for myself, even after the campaign four years ago, I didn't realize what a powerful tool this is.....It has re-democratized America. There is an enormous shift in power." More after the jump...

The bigfoots of the press were all in Chicago this past weekend for YearlyKos, and they churned out lots of coverage. So did the littlefoots of the web. Plus, Ron Paul beats Barack Obama on YouTube!

So, this afternoon I got an email reading, "Howard Dean sent you a message on Facebook." (This is after I decided to accept his friend invitation yesterday.) Well, it wasn't really from Dean. What I did get was an email from the person who is paid to "be" Howard Dean on Facebook, or rather, one of the staffers behind his profile, Stephanie Taylor, the managing editor of Democrats.org. I wish I could say I was disappointed to not hear directly from the Governor, but this is what I expected. Let's parse what she wrote...

Today, I got a friend request on Facebook from Howard Dean, and I decided to break my own rule on accepting such requests from politicians, because I wonder how he's going to use Facebook...and if he'll now respond to my email to him.