Ed Cone interviews John Edward’s internet team.
Edwards raised $450K online Thursday, with an average contribution of $79.82.
Aaron Myers, says that the current campaign is far from business as usual. ?Things are totally different now from 2000,? he says. ?The biggest difference between this year and four years ago is the number of people acting independently, out somebody?s garage, supporting the candidate. That?s exploded.?

Blogger Rex Hammock writes about his brief meeting with the President:
“My Warholian 15/45 minutes: I?m writing this in a cab on my way to BWI for a flight back home to Nashville. I just walked out of the Old Executive Office Building where four other ?real people? and I sat down for a 25-minute chat with the President of the United States. Then the five of us stood behind him while he told a room full of people why the tax cuts he has championed should be made permanent…..”
Meanwhile, from the Washington Post:
The White House press corps yesterday scrambled to figure out why a hastily-arranged “conversation” between President Bush and some regular Americans about the economy was suddenly closed to reporters — and what went on behind those closed doors.

If you want to learn about politics at its hardest core, read this article in the Chicago Sun-Times How Democrat fund-raiser scored Dean knockout.
The author of the article, Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet, is currently in residence at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I attended a seminar yesterday in which she introduced David W. Jones, the fund-raiser who produced the attack ads.
Using a “527 committee” which is allowed under the McCain-Feingold law, Jones raised $663,000 from only 26 donors, including $100,000 from a single donor. He used the money to fund a poll to assess Dean’s vulnerabilities, and 3 attack ads that went after Dean: Top Grades, Facts, and the notorious Osama ad.
Thanks to Centerfield

Adam Curry provides more updates on his visit to Iraq with the Dutch Marines. Fascinating stories & photos.

An assistant state attorney general advised public officials Wednesday not to use e-mails to communicate back and forth with their fellow members on local government bodies because they could be violating Wisconsin’s open meetings law.
The use of e-mail is “a thorny issue,” Assistant Attorney General Bruce Olsen told an audience of about 100 local government and school board officials, law enforcement officers, attorneys and journalists at a seminar organized by the state Department of Justice.
“Sometimes it looks like a letter and sometimes it looks like a conversation,” Olsen said of e-mail correspondence. AMY RINARD – Journal-Sentinel

The Wisconsin AFSCME chapter ran TV ads during tonight’s UW-Illinois Men’s Basketball game (The Badgers lost in Champaign).
Rather than spending money on TV (expensive and fewer viewers every day), why don’t they tell their story online via weblog(s), email lists and search engine placements?
UPDATE: Toyota announced an exclusive auto sponsorship deal with Ebay. There are many marketing/pr and community opportunities on the internet.

Dane County & City of Madison 2/17/2004 Election Results are posted here.
The Dane County Casino vote is going down, big.
Speaking of elections, the Washington Post has an interesting article on a 29 year old American, Tobin Bradley who is organizing elections in rural Iraq.

Adam Curry, DJ/VJ and active blogger is in Iraq with the Dutch Marines (he lives in Amsterdam).
Curry’s blog has daily updates. He’s also posted a photo album.
Fascinating.

Jon Gertner has written a useful article on combining voter databases with other profiles:
So who are they? Where are they? Are they rich, with three kids and a jumbo mortgage? Do they own fly rods and drive minivans? Do they go to church or temple? And maybe most important, who among them has never voted, or rarely voted, or voted in ways that may deserve the special status of swing voter? To do the job right, of course, to really win this thing, you’ve got to find them, woo them and get them to the polls. Where to start?
These days, the first stop is a comprehensive database of U.S. voters. There are fewer than half a dozen of them. One, named Voter Vault, belongs to the Republican National Committee; another, named Datamart, belongs to the Democratic National Committee. Over the past few years, thanks to technological advances and an escalating arms race between the parties, Republicans and Democrats have gone to great lengths to make campaigning more like commercial marketing. Moreover, both parties have begun to sort through their troves of information in order to identify and then court individual voters.
The result: direct mail and phone calls during the election season…