The Facebooker Who Friended Obama, a piece published in this morning’s New York Times, paints an extremely flattering picture of Sen. Obama’s Internet presence and strategy. Orchestrated with some help by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, Sen. Obama’s campaign has treated the Internet “as the connective tissue” between online organizing and offline action.

“Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives.”

Sen. Obama’s embrace of the Internet stems from his belief “that real change comes from the bottom up” (beliefs cultivated, of course, when he was a community organizer) — “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.”

While the piece does not highlight how Obama supporters are using Obama’s social network to question the Senator’s policy decisions, it does suggest that a vote for Obama might be a vote for official technological change in the Oval Office: “Mr. Obama has pledged that if he is elected, he will hire a chief technology officer.”

The piece also highlights nicely the way the campaign is trying to connect on and offline efforts on the part of the candidate’s supporters — one of the hardest-to-accomplish tasks with any organizational action that is executed online. They to nicely synthesize these two worlds, and has consciously worked to do so especially after realizing that after the primary by helping their users to more-easily phone bank and go door to door in search of other supporters. While Sen. Obama’s campaign has taken a lot from the world of small grassroots campaigns, that world can now take some cues from his campaign, which has had the luxury of the money and minds necessarily for figuring out how to best integrate communication technologies into setting collective action into motion.

Also in eAction news:

• Collective intelligence doesn’t necessarily make us smarter
• Chinese bloggers’ victory against government

-Filed in News