Online, Obama Starts to Beat Ron Paul

Online, Sen. Barack Obama has been dubbed the "Barocket" -- and for good reason. Throughout last year, he was the most popular Democratic candidate on the Internet, with more friends on MySpace (now 215,000), supporters on Facebook (numbering north of 200,000) and channel views on YouTube (11 million) than any other presidential Democratic contender.

And it looks like that support is continuing.

This week, Obama's campaign announced that it received money from 100,000 online donors in the first 15 days of the year. Though the campaign won't announced exactly how much money that is -- unlike Rep. Ron Paul, who has made his online contributions public in real time -- it's still a stunning figure, say online political observers. Wrote Joshua Levy of TechPresident, the bipartisan group blog that tracks online campaigning: "in the last two weeks alone he's averaged about 50,000 donors a week. That's darn impressive, and it looks like Barack Obama has displaced Ron Paul to become the online fundraising juggernaut of the campaign."

But the Web is more than just raising funds, as all the candidates are learning. It's also about providing voters with organizing tools that enable them to become not just supporters but also surrogates for the campaign. On this score, Obama, too, is finding a lot of success.

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http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/01/17/online_obama_starts_to_beat_ro_1.html