'"Barack Obama built the biggest network of supporters we've seen using the Internet to do it,"' says Joe Trippi, an Internet political and business consultant. Along with being the first African American president, Obama changed the way politicians will and do use the Internet for campaigning. JFK started the era of television presidency and Obama started the era of Internet presidency. The Obama Campaign used sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to gain massive support. YouTube users watched 14.5 million hours of Barack Obama campaign videos and his Facebook page had 2.6 million supporters, where John McCain's Facebook page had about 624,000 supporters. Obama's Twitter account is the most popular account on Twitter with 123,000 followers. Along with his supporters on private social networking sites, Obama was the topic of almost 500 million blog posts since the end of August (2008) conventions. The Obama Campaign and his supporters made it simple for other supporters, undecided voters, and McCain supporters to download campaign literature and discuss issues with other Obama supporters in the virtual world, which hadn't been done to this extent before. As mentioned, Obama changed the role of the Internet in campaigning making the Internet "the king of all political media."
InformationWeek (Nov 5th, 208) (1055 words), "Obama Election Ushering in First Internet Presidency; Pioneering use of Web 2.0 and social-networking technologies by the president-elect's campaign has seemingly transformed politics, and could influence government as well. (Barack Obama).
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