Real Wages, Real Coalitions, and a Word on New Tech

"I want to look at places that are not designed to be political, but politics take place there. If you just look at candidate Web sites, you just see a limited amount of political action," she said. "But when you go to other sites like sports talk boards, you see a lot of political commentary and engagement."

Bingo. That's the key, and its the piece that everyone seems to be overlooking (or at least not explicitly talking about) in all the discussions about new media, online outreach, and social networking. If you think about the campaign as a series of concentric circles, the campaign is the hub and social networks, YouTube, etc are the first layer of "new media" circles.

That's as far as anyone is really taking it, but the whole point is that those first circles expand into other circles - smaller MySpace and FaceBook groups, groups on other, less popular social networks, online discussion boards, etc. Each step out gets less political in its main purpose, but it's these periphery locations and the ability to move political conversations into them that will be the key to really tapping the full power of "New Media."