YouTube features both candidates on the "You Choose '08" page.
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Just as the phenomenon of political blogging broke through to the mainstream with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's groundbreaking bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, this election cycle marks the first presidential campaign of the YouTube era.

And just as the Internet "invented Howard Dean" by tapping into youthful enthusiasm and creative fund-raising techniques, the current campaigns have taken those building blocks and constructed the next level of functionality.

A recent Pew study contrasted the content of the two candidates' online presences, noting that "as of September 9, Obama had 510,799 MySpace 'friends' (compared to McCain's 87,652) and more than 1.7 million Facebook pals (compared to 309,591 for McCain). The Obama camp also had twice as many videos posted on his official YouTube channel than McCain."

In particular, though, Obama has engaged with potential supporters on a scale Dean could only have imagined. In the process, he has amassed a network of mostly young volunteers, bloggers and small donors, enabling him to raise the most money ever of any presidential candidate, and leading the Republican National Committee (RNC) to cry foul over suspected "illegal and foreign donors".

In an increasingly interconnected world, however, technology allows—indeed encourages—politics to spread beyond geographic borders. Whether domestic rules can keep up is a separate discussion.

In a new book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & The Future of American Politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais advance the notion that what we are witnessing with this election is nothing less than a generational realignment, prompted by an explosion in online social networking and technological capability among an emerging generation of citizens—the so-called Millennials—who combine a personal optimism with a lack of faith in the current political system to adequately address society's ills.

In their book, Winograd and Hais talk about the importance for politicians of harnessing (or at least attempting to harness) successive technological waves: "While it is true that each time a new form of communications technology has appeared, the first candidate to figure out how to maximize its impact in campaigns has triumphed, it is also true that the ultimate winner of the campaign technology arms race has not always been the first to use the medium well," they write. "Sometimes the party that has suffered defeat from the initial use of the technology has learned from that experience and gone on to master the technology, using it to help regain power."

There are of course pitfalls. For every viral video sensation that has helped one candidate tap a groove of cool over another, there can also be a disconnected lapse, committed forever to video, or even a simple lack of understanding of how the unblinking eye in the end can even decide who gets to be a candidate and who doesn't. Events  believed long consigned to history can be embarrassingly resuscitated years later. And although the campaigns and 527 advocacy groups are using Web-only ads to generate buzz with online audiences and the press, YouTube is sizzling with resurgent political satire that embraces those candidates able to use mainstream shows like NBC's Saturday Night Live or Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as vehicles for communicating political messages to win hearts and minds.