How Was Passion Stirred Through Interactivity in Obama's Blog?

Abstract

The impact of new technology on the current presidential campaign has prevailed. A small but fundamental change quietly took place in the candidate’s website—Barack Obama’s official campaign blog. The campaign is now operating two sub-blogs at the same time, the Obamablog (also known as the Obama HQ blog) and the Community Blog. The former becomes a must-have tool in a political campaigner’s strategy, whereas the latter, which allows visitors to actually write, publish, and manage posts, is novel. This new function seems an audacious step up from the rest of the blogs of this kind since the 2004 presidential election because it gives citizen users freedom to express their own ideas that could put the campaign on an impromptu situation to respond.