I protest.

Wowf!

Well, it looks like the Dean for America campaign made their goal tonight. With almost two more hours to go here on the West Coast, they've pulled in over $7.1 million for the quarter. Over $700,000 today alone. That's impressive, especially when you realize that of the $3.8 million they raised over the last nine days, some $3 million of it was raised via the Internet.

Easy prediction: From now on, every politician who matters will have an online presence. Another easy prediction: Until this becomes commonplace and unremarked, most of those online presences will be crap.

Obviously the Dean bunch get the power of the Internet. What many people, particularly over the last few years, seem to miss is that the Internet isn't a thing in itself. It is a tool. It makes it easier for individuals, singly and collectively, to communicate. This is actually something I've known since, basically, the beginning. I was first online around 1983 or so, first on Usenet (using the old public-access system "killer" in Dallas) via long-distance dialup, then (by 1988 or so) on a work Usenet site and subsequently on what was then still the Arpanet. During all of that time I knew that this new mechanism presented a sea change in the way people communicate. Even being able to conduct ongoing online conversations with people all over the world over the course of hours and days was a huge advantage, even without the speed of information flow that came a little later. Now, some fifteen years after I gained permanent fulltime access to the Internet, it has finally shown the first indication of its true power.

This is a field that was not brought about by the Internet; it existed long before. It is one, though, that has now been fundamentally changed by the presence of this new medium of communication.