Sen. Edwards online

Ed Cone analyzes John Edwards' online effort. He writes that the Web staff is active, serious, and successful (as measured by fundraising and communication)...

But there is no sense here of a revolution, or a movement in which the Internet takes on a mystique of its own. The rhetoric of transformation I heard at Dean headquarters, of power pushed to the edges to create a new type of campaign, is lacking. The candidate, not the online tools, generates the buzz. ...

Edwards recently topped the 10,000 mark in Meetup registrations, up five-fold in the last few months, but still well behind John Kerry’s nearly 50,000 Meetup registrants. Myers says he was impressed by Meetup when he first learned of it a year ago, but was ultimately driven to advocate for the service seriously when he saw how it worked for his rivals. “What pushed us there is that it worked for other people,” he says. Letter-writing and phone calls, coordinated online, have been valuable volunteer activities. Volunteers use the web to communicate with each other, says Winn, doing things like alerting the community to negative stories in newspapers, and coordinating responses to media coverage.

Volunteers have also helped build the campaign’s online arsenal, creating tools that facilitate local meetings between supporters, for example. The connection between staff and volunteers is tight. Myers talks to key volunteers like Mike Kasper on “a pretty regular basis,” he says. “I go days without seeing what he’s working on, then I’m amazed to see what he puts together. He’s been included in every major change we’ve made.” ...

The site is built on Slash, the open-source software that powers Slashdot. “It’s worked out great, because we can customize it, and grow with it,” says Winn. He reads other blogs as part of his job, and reports on them to Myers, who says he has little time to check out the Web – even competitors’ sites.

(Link via InstaPundit.)