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And we thought the YouTube and Facebook presidential debates were all that.

The latest in debate 2.0 is a campaign face-off on Twitter sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum that started Friday and is expected to go on at least through the end of the organization's annual conference on Tuesday night.

With a focus on technology and government, the debate is being moderated by Time magazine blogger Anna Marie Cox. The McCain campaign is represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign is represented by Mike Nelson, a Georgetown University professor who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.

It's yet another interesting use of technology to engage voters in the campaign, so long as they don't mind sorting through posts that while succinct (Twitter has a 140-character limit for individual Tweets), are already plentiful. And we can only hope that the geek community's beloved Twitter doesn't crash amid the traffic.

Once Barack Obama started Twittering, John McCain created a MySpace page, and Hillary Clinton joined Facebook, it became apparent that the 2008 presidential election was relying heavily on social media. But now, a Pew survey has the numbers to prove it, concluding that 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet for politics so far this election season, with topics like Obama and online videos taking a front seat.

The poll, conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project, was based on information provided by Princeton Survey Research Associates.

Earlier this spring, the surveyors contacted 2,251 Americans to find out how they are using the Web to investigate and communicate about the election. The survey results found that almost half are turning to the Web to get information about the presidential race. That's a significant jump from the spring of the 2004 election, when only one-third of adults said they looked online for election news.

Several of the conclusions show numbers doubling or tripling from the last presidential election season. One of these was in the area of online political videos. In 2004, only 13 percent of adults said they watched online videos concerning the election, but this year, already 35 percent use sites like YouTube for partisan information. And people aren't just watching campaign ads, but seeking out primary sources like recorded speeches.

Young Democrats and Obama supporters reportedly lead the wave of political blogging and researching, with 74 percent of Internet-using Obama supporters logging on to follow the campaign, compared with Clinton's 57 percent and McCain's 56 percent.

And young voters are using the Web in different ways than other generations. The study found that young voters are consuming more political online video than older adults, while creating their own political commentary with posts, e-mails, text messages, and social-networking sites. One-third of all 18- to 29-year-old adults used a social-networking site for political activities like adding candidates as their friends.

Despite the statistics on increasing Internet usage, the Pew study concluded 74 percent of users said they would be just as involved in the campaign without using the Internet, a result that was also highlighted in a Pew report this January.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--How are Twitter and Facebook changing the game for the 2008 presidential frontrunners? Online media executives say the answer will be pivotal to future campaigns, but that it won't come until November.

"Voter-generated content is the wild card of 2008," said Micah Sifry, co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum and the political site TechPresident.com. Sifry spoke here Monday night for the opening of Economics of Social Media 2008, a one-day conference. "The bottom line is that the campaigns have lost control."

Sifry, who was part of a panel of online media executives discussing social media and politics, was referring to the rise of sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook since the 2004 elections. Newly armed with online pulpits, more citizens are using these sites to vocalize opinions through video, blogs, or podcasts, and to mobilize community efforts around the candidates. At the same time, the presidential candidates are taking advantage of social media sites to reach new audiences, raise money, and respond to voters in real time.

"We're entering the age of mass participation in the making of a campaign and not just in the making of the result," Sifry said.

Betsy Morgan, the Huffington Post's CEO who joined the newly minted "Internet newspaper" just six months ago from CBS.com, said that the candidates have been much savvier about the way they use the Internet in this campaign. Presidential contender Barack Obama, for example, wrote an editorial exclusively for the Huffington Post and that message was presented on the front page in a way it would not have been in The New York Times.

"He got the message out in the way that he wanted," she said.

Despite the increasing power of the Internet to the campaign, the candidates are still spending most of their money on advertising with traditional media on 30-second commercials, she said. "There's still that feeling that that spending will get people out of their chairs," Morgan said.

It may take another political cycle for the ad dollars to follow the trends. Manuel Perez, senior supervising producer of CNN.com, said that Obama has shown that his "grassroots" efforts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites has gone a long way to engage young voters. "That's a big change," Perez said.

Other media executives said what's different about this campaign is that people are contributing to a near real-time feedback loop through the Web that's changing how stories unfold.

"The networks that provide 'first to see' immediacy (in the news) will rise," said Leonard Brody, co-founder and CEO of NowPublic, a citizen journalist Web site that has more than 140,000 contributing writers.

Chuck DeFeo agreed. DeFeo is vice president and general manager of Townhall.com, a conservative online community with more than 250 podcasts. "People (have the) ability to shape the narrative...and knock them off their talking points. We'll only see more of that."

Sifry said that Obama has defied the odds related to rival Hillary Clinton, who held the lead in the national polls last year, because of his grassroots efforts with social media, including on Twitter, Facebook, and MyBarackObama.com. He said that Obama appeals to a dominant constituency online of younger voters, as well as an upper-class, more intellectual voter. For that reason, he said, Obama has 1.5 million individual donors at this stage in his campaign, or about what George W. Bush had in November 2004. (DeFeo was quick to correct Sifry by saying that Bush had more like 1.6 million donors at that point.)

"After this political cycle, we won't see a campaign without a social network," said Sifry. "I think come fall, McCain will suffer because he doesn't have an organic social media effort or (what he has is) at least one-tenth the size of what the Democrats have now."

DeFeo countered that during Bush's presidential 2004 run, members of the campaign urged people to take action offline, rather than online, by working a phone bank or organizing a "walk the vote" campaign. Those actions presumably had more a direct correlation to the outcome at the polls.

"The last thing we wanted people to do was create a blog," said DeFeo, who worked on that campaign.

Still, he acknowledged that the 2008 campaign is different.

"This is truly an election that will be pivotal," DeFeo said. "We've yet to see how online social media will effect" voter turnout.

A few years ago, the Federal Election Commission ruled that bloggers are eligible for the same exemptions from campaign-finance law as mainstream media outlets have enjoyed for decades.

But the FEC's membership will change over time, meaning that the beliefs of the commissioners are likely to change as well. So a future FEC could rule differently. That's what concerns Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), a longtime proponent of extending campaign-finance laws to the Internet.

His answer: On Thursday, Hensarling introduced a four-page bill he's calling the Blogger Protection Act of 2008.

Hensarling intends to enshrine into U.S. law two components of what the Federal Election Commission decided in March 2006: namely, that when political bloggers and other Internet users write about candidates' positions, link to candidate Web sites, send or forward campaign-related messages, and create or host campaign-related Web sites, they generally need not report their activities to the government as "contributions" or "expenditures" on behalf of a candidate. A second section dictates that "any Internet or electronic publication (including a blog)" will be considered exempt from campaign-finance rules.

"Regulations can be changed without congressional action, and there's no telling what a future FEC might decide to do," the Texas congressman wrote in a recent letter to his House colleagues seeking co-sponsors for the measure. "Furthermore, the FEC is currently defunct because of vacancies and a lack of quorum."

Previous FEC rules have run into court trouble. In 2004, a federal judge threw out the regulators' attempts to exempt Internet political ads from campaign finance law, forcing new, narrower rules to be crafted.

The FEC, for its part, has already applied its rules to at least two specific cases involving allegations that political blogs ran afoul of campaign-finance laws. In both situations, which involved the liberal blog DailyKos and a blog that advocated the defeat of California Republican Rep. Mary Bono, the FEC ruled in a way that suggested political blogging was exempt from normal campaign-finance obligations.

Hensarling's bill doesn't appear to affect other portions of the existing FEC regulations, though. They require, among other things, that candidates, political parties, and other campaign organizations report any paid political advertising that appears on someone else's Web site and report any payments to bloggers or online commentators.

WASHINGTON--Iconic Internet law professor Larry Lessig may have cast off plans for a congressional bid of his own, but he still wants to turn the political process as we know it upside down.

No more money from corporate political action committees and lobbyists. No more earmarks to fund pet projects in federal spending bills. Public financing for all congressional campaigns. And throughout it all, transparency.

Those are the four pillars of Lessig's "Change Congress" movement, which he unveiled, along with a beta Web site, which he describes as a "mash-up applied to politics," at an event here Thursday afternoon. For the project, he has teamed up with Joe Trippi, best known as the national campaign manager for Democrat Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and its pioneering use of online organizing.

None of his ideas, of course, are particularly new, which Lessig himself readily acknowledged. A number of organizations--including Ralph Nader's Public Citizen and the Sunlight Foundation, which sponsored his talk on Thursday--dedicate themselves exclusively to promoting government transparency. Projects like Open Secrets offer more readily searchable databases of political campaign contributions, while groups like Citizens Against Government Waste have made it a mission to expose congressional pork-barrel spending.

And even some politicians are already displaying interest in those topics. A number of congressional Republicans have been rallying for an earmark freeze. On the Democratic side, Senators Barack Obama (and, when he was in the race, former Sen. John Edwards) pledged not to accept presidential campaign contributions from registered lobbyists and PACs.

Lessig, who briefly flirted with running this year for the Silicon Valley seat vacated by the late Rep. Tom Lantos, said he's not trying to compete with existing efforts but to "complement" them.

"My claim here is not some simple claim against money or the importance of money," Lessig said, as he paged through slides containing key words ("dependence") and an occasional image (dollar bills, the U.S. Capitol). "We just need to recognize that money in certain places is destructive of trust."

It's not "personal corruption" he's after, either, as he said he considers the current Democratic Congress to be one of the least corrupt in history. Rather, it's an "institutional" corruption, which he said is exemplified, to name a few examples, by the sugar lobby's alleged influence on government nutritional guidelines, the pharmaceutical lobby's influence on federal drug approvals, and the energy lobby's influence on global warming policy. Key policy errors are being made because of this "economy of influence" and "improper dependence on money," Lessig charged.

"It's not a dependence that reveals itself in the way evil people act, but a dependence that corrupts even the way good people solve the problems they come to Washington to address," he said. "We need to solve this problem now."

Lessig even hit out at unnamed law-professor colleagues for "accepting money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to write these expert reports," saying he eschews discussing public policy matters "related to anyone who has ever compensated me." He recounted feeling more than a little resentment when, in an e-mail exchange with Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), the senator implied that Lessig's support for Net neutrality regulations stemmed from monetary nudging from the likes of Google, which was not the case.

The first "layer" of the Change Congress project is now live at its Web site. It allows politicians and citizens alike to sign up in support of one or more or the movement's four tenets and nab an icon and code to broadcast their support on their Web sites. The approach is modeled after Lessig's own Creative Commons licensing arrangement, in which content creators are free to customize the extent to which others can share and remix their works.

"We just need to recognize that money in certain places is destructive of trust."

--Larry Lessig

The site also houses a "sludge-colored" map on which users can click congressional districts and learn how much of an elected politico's political donations come from PACs.

In a second phase, Lessig plans to use Wikipedia-style tools to attract collaborators who work on discerning where various candidates and members of Congress stand on the movement's four principles. Those citizens will also ask the politicians to pledge their support formally, and they'll use that information to plot out, district by district, who's in and who's out. Lessig said he's going after the Wikipedia model of amassing information, mobilizing lots of people to share the research and advocacy in a "manageable, digestible, segmentable" way.

During the final phase, people will be asked to pledge money to candidates who have supported the Change Congress movement's priorities.

Lessig likened his vision to what an alcoholic's struggle for recovery. Sure, that person has to worry about resolving problems with his family, or his job, or his liver, but before he can face those things, he has to confront the alcoholism itself.

The way Lessig sees it, the nation's most important problems--global warming, education, and the Iraq war, to name a few--can't be remedied until "we solve this first problem, this dependence on money."

If the outcome of this year's presidential race depended solely on the whims of computer industry workers, it appears that there'd be a draw.

Or at least that's what a survey of 600 employees in that space recently found. The questionnaire was conducted just before the early March primaries by the Computing Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, a trade association that represents mostly smaller technology companies, and Rasmussen Reports, a public-opinion research organization.

In response to a question about who'd get their votes if the election were "today," both Democrat Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain received 29 percent of the vote. Hillary Clinton trailed behind them with 13 percent, according to results released Tuesday. (Here's CompTIA's PowerPoint presentation of the findings.)

Republican Mike Huckabee racked up 11 percent of the vote, and Internet sweetheart Ron Paul nabbed 9 percent. Another 9 percent of the survey respondents said they were undecided.

More broadly, 35 percent of the survey respondents identified themselves as Republican, 26 percent as Democrat, and 40 percent as "other." Broken down further, 39 percent identified themselves as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, 24 percent as liberal, and 2 percent as "not sure."

Update at 1:45 p.m. PST: The survey was conducted by phone and through a scientifically random distribution, CompTIA spokesman Mike Wendy said. Call recipients were asked first whether they were American, over the age of 18, and an information technology worker, and if they answered affirmatively to all three, the call proceeded. That process was repeated until 600 IT workers were reached.

The findings demonstrate that the high-tech workforce, which CompTIA says numbers about 12 million, is "clearly a large and well-off group of independent-minded voters, whose loyalty is up for grabs," said Roger Cochetti, the group's public-policy director.

Still, it would seem that the economic sector isn't necessarily representative of the American public. Obama, after all, did lose Silicon Valley to Clinton on Super Tuesday, though he has shaped up to be more of an Internet darling than his rival.

Rasmussen's own latest "presidential tracking poll" of 1,600 likely voters, regardless of employment sector, indicates a much tighter race on the Democratic side than the tech sector survey suggested. A Monday night survey found that Obama was favored by 45 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, while Clinton attracted 44 percent.

A roundup of other recent polls by Gallup, CNN, USA Today, and others, found that Obama averaged a 2 percent advantage, though Clinton was favored in some of the individual surveys.

An average of those polls also shows that less than a percentage point separates McCain from Obama or Clinton, based on separate polls pitting him against each of the Democrats.

For the record, men composed the largest chunk of survey respondents, at 77 percent, which may account to some degree for the lackluster Clinton vote. About three-fourths of the survey respondents were white, and nearly half were college graduates. About a third of them said they earn more than $100,000 annually, but otherwise, income levels were all over the map. About a fourth of the respondents said they had contributed to a presidential campaign.

The survey--the second of what CompTIA has billed as a series of surveys aimed at amplifying technology interests in this year's election cycle--didn't delve much into specific policy topics. But it did note that respondents ranked the economy, the war in Iraq, and immigration, respectively, as the top three most important issues for the next president.

A more detailed report dissecting specific policy issues that inform technology workers' votes is expected to be released later this month.

When Meg Whitman steps down from her post as eBay chief executive at the end of the month, another prominent position awaits her: co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign.

The presumed Republican nominee said Friday that he has asked Whitman to play a "lead role" in the campaign, helping to lead fund-raising, traveling the country on McCain's behalf, and assisting with policy development.

Whitman said in a statement that she was "honored" to be selected.

The Arizona senator's "unshakable commitment to lower taxes, strong trade, and innovation sets the right course for America's economy and future prosperity," she said. "I'm enormously excited to be a part of his team and believe in his vision for our country."

Whitman joined eBay in March 1998, witnessing its rise from a start-up to an international cult sensation, along with its more recent slowed growth due to competition from Amazon.com and others.

Involvement with the McCain campaign isn't her first foray into the 2008 presidential race. When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was still a contender, she helped to manage his fund-raising activities.

Whitman has also been a generous Republican Party donor for years, cutting checks to a variety of congressional campaigns and committees. According to campaign finance records compiled by the organization Opensecrets.org, she gave $25,000 last November to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The California-based executive apparently hasn't ruled out political ambitions of her own, either. She's reportedly flirting with the possibility of running for governor of her home state in 2010.

Confirming weeks of speculation, Larry Lessig, the Stanford University law professor and "free culture" icon, has confessed that yes indeed, he's considering a run for the U.S. Congress this year.

The revelation came in a brief blog entry on Lessig's Web site early Wednesday morning.

Remarking that "lots of fear and uncertainty" accompany his announcement, Lessig said he'll continue reflecting over the next few days on whether he's up for entering the fray. A final decision will come around March 1.

Lessig would be vying for the seat vacated by the death last week of Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to Congress. He would, however, also face what he readily acknowledges is an "extraordinarily difficult" race: Jackie Speier--an "extraordinarily good" California state senator and "professional politician," by Lessig's own description--has already announced her candidacy.

Lessig may be a well-known critic of expansive copyright laws, founder of the less-restrictive Creative Commons licensing approach, and a pioneer in cyberspace legal issues, but his preliminary platform--so far, at least--isn't focused on any of that.

In a 10-minute video, Lessig says he's committed to a mantra of "Change Congress," focused on abolishing what he views as the corruptive influence of money in the policymaking process. (He calls out Speier, for instance, for accepting $250,000 from insurance companies while heading up the state senate's insurance committee.)

For Lessig, that translates into a making a three-pronged commitment to "fix" old Washington ways: not accepting money from lobbyists or political action committees, voting to ban all "earmarks" on congressional spending bills, and supporting public financing of campaigns. He indicated he'll be pushing that new "project" regardless of whether he runs for office.

Lessig said he was encouraged to weigh a congressional run by the "Draft Lessig" Web site and Facebook page that have sprung up in recent weeks.

"But I will only be able to run for Congress if you show your support right now," he says at the close of his video. "I need to see your support right now to understand there is enough support for this idea to make this campaign worth it."

On the presidential front, Lessig has recently come out in support of Barack Obama.

Speaking as someone whose political views are decidedly left, I never thought I'd say this, but would Moveon.Org just put a plug in it already?

As an Internet phenomenon, MoveOn certainly demonstrated how to mobilize public opinion. Indeed, the organization, founded in 1998 by a married couple of nouveau-riche techies, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, acquitted itself well during the Monica Lewinsky uproar.

Unlike a sadly servile mainstream media, which insisted upon playing to the lowest common denominator, a spunky MoveOn appeared seemingly out of nowhere to rally online opposition to the sham taking place in Washington.

But no matter what you thought about the nature of Bill Clinton's actions leading up to Lewinsky-gate, MoveOn's organizational activity represented a textbook example how civil society is supposed to function in a republic. This was interest group politics at its best--as American as apple pie and Federalist Paper No. 10.

MoveOn has played a big role in Congress' (still-to-be-decided) Net neutrality debate, while its pressure tactics also helped stoke opposition to Facebook's ill-considered Beacon program, which would have posted information about users' activities on partner sites. I wasn't as exercised about Beacon's threat to our individual liberties. Facebook was more guilty of glossing over legitimate privacy concerns than it was due to nefarious intent. In any case, Facebook users would have rejected Beacon and forced the company to go back to the drawing board on their own. Did they really need an energetic, group-think organization to dictate the correct party line?

Even before then, my enthusiasm for MoveOn's shtick had begun to wane. I think it was the "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" advertisement last September that was the last straw.

Nobody in this country should be above criticism--and that includes appointed military leaders. But the ad unfairly smeared Petraeus, a dedicated professional and one of the most capable U.S. officers ever to serve in Iraq. MoveOn's lame response was that the ad was "successful" in its intent. To wit: "Call the credibility of Petraeus' testimony into question. It garnered more coverage than any ad that MoveOn.org has run in years. Every time Republicans debated the ad, they helped raise questions around reliability of the General's report."

When I read that, I could only murmur sotto voce a disgusted, "you've got to be f---ing kidding me."

Now it's Obama-grams seemingly every day arriving in my inbox from the MoveOn crowd. Enough! I'll make up my own mind. Barack Obama's a fine candidate, but I think Hillary Clinton would make just as capable a 44th president.

Blades and Boyd made a bundle by convincing a sucker to pay millions for the flying toaster screen servers and other forgettable pop-culture bric-a-brac turned out by their company. But business savvy doesn't always translate into political acumen. (If they want to give me an argument, I'd only point to Dick Cheney's multimillion dollar payday from Halliburton as Exhibit A.)