I met with Nicco Mele yesterday, one of the major masterminds behind the online efforts for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. As you can see from the picture, he was a little distracted. I consider this picture to be empirical evidence that activity for the election of 2008 is starting to get heated.

I was very involved myself online in the last election and I hope to play a big part in this election as well. I've always been a Democrat but at the same time, I would say I'm relatively a-political. Last term, when George Bush announced he would run again, however, I knew enough was enough and I dropped everything and decided to devote my entire life to help prevent his re-election. Sigh.

This time I'm not going to be doing ANY fighting. I am just going to help with enabling the technology and social structures that we all need to see what's really going on; the politicians need to be able to take the media into their own hands so we can discover their ideals and come to know more about who they really are, off-guard and on.

When I met John Edwards for the first time over helping to set up his videoblog (what seems like a long time ago as he was the first major politician to embrace the medium), I remember this glorious moment where we placed the camera in his hands, had him turn the camera back on himself and then said ok now go for it!

He told me that during the last election, the only time politicians were able to really take hold of the media was during the debates because that was the only time they would get two solid minutes to state their ideas clearly, uninterrupted.

I was shocked - SHOCKED! - two minutes is absurd; how can you justify such large ideas in two minutes? This explains why they dont answer the questions during the debate but instead use the airtime to say what they need to.

Edwards then illuminated the fact that the news media on TV picks their angles on what points to focus on, edit everything up based on their angle, and then usually cut to a commercial or another story well before two minutes elapses.

Even though the candidates all used video in the last election, the audience for video wasn't really building until the end. (*as a side note, when I created a video/DVD website for Edwards in March of 2004, I got the idea for Rocketboom one night).

If you are one of the few who reads Dembot, at least you know as well as I do that there is a pretty major audience out there right now for video and the mainstream rush is definitely on. YouTube alone is serving over 100 million videos per day.

With regards to empowering politics, not only will we get to read it from the horses mouth, and hear it, in many cases we are going to be able to click to see the whole thing. That is major empowerment for everyone. The democratization of media will play a big part in democratizing politics.