The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage "precinct captains" -- volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. The campaign started using the software during the run up to an earlier nominating contest in California -- the nation's most populous state. "The Web-based collaboration platform combined with a strong organized grass-roots effort, created unprecedented public involvement that is revitalizing politics in America," said Patrick DeTemple, the California Data & Systems Manager for the Obama campaign. "Not since Bobby Kennedy has there been such an extensive Precinct Captain operation for a presidential candidate in California."

Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals' Basecamp (to put it in some perspective). Though most users are business clients who utilize the software as a private intranet, the Obama campaign is using it to power a public facing wiki to organize information for precinct captains in Texas. According to Garcia, the campaign is using the software on their own without much input beyond basic support from Central Desktop -- or in other words, the campaign has been savvy enough to figure out how to utilize an existing tool for a completely new use case.

In fact, Garcia told me that Central Desktop was actually unaware that the campaign had planned to use their software for additional states following California until they noticed an influx of traffic on their servers going to the campaign's new Texas site. Further, according to Garcia, the idea to use collaboration software to manage precinct captains was actually something that bubbled up in the campaign from the grassroots volunteers who were out in the field.

That the Obama campaign is so tech savvy and so open to using social software is unsurprising. They have run one of the most comprehensive online campaigns in recent memory -- perhaps ever -- generally outperforming opponents on nearly every social network or social media site, and according to a recent post from Ning's Marc Andreesen, Obama has long been very interested in social networking and how it can affect politics.

The specific appeal of Central Desktop's wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. The Texas effort, some of which was cloned over from the previous California site, was literally launched a couple of weeks ago in mid-February.

In 2004, the Howard Dean campaign famously used Meetup.com to mobilize supporters. But Dean's use of Meetup was mostly about bringing supporters together to share a common experience. It was not so much a focused and organized campaigning effort, as Obama's use of Central Desktop's software has been. Garcia was hesitant to say for sure, but he thinks Obama's may be the first campaign to make heavy use of collaboration software to help manage on the ground organization (though, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul both utilized Salesforce.com in their campaigns).

Update: Jason Fried pinged us to let us know that the Obama campaign is actually using Basecamp as well. The new media team at the campaign's national headquarters in Chicago (where 37Signals is based), for example, used Basecamp to collaborate while building BarackObama.com. Basecamp is also being used by some parts of the campaign in New York City to manage events.

UPDATE: Also check out Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday, our guide to following Super Tuesday via the Internet.

Looking over Obama's numbers, we see that an overwhelming amount of that $28 million was via small donations -- 90% under $100 each. 10,000 people gave between $5 and $10. That's a whole new paradigm for fundraising. Rather than chase $2,300 checks from a few hundred rich people at lavish fundraisers (okay, they still do that), campaigns can more easily focus on collecting thousands of smaller donations from regular people that add up to the same amount (or more).

Further, 10,000 donations under $10 means the email addresses of 10,000 people who can still give more money later. About half of Hilary Clinton's money came from "maxed out" voters compared to just about one third for Obama. That gives Obama a much larger pool of donors to hit up for more cash and to put on notice for get out the vote campaigns.

Though I am loathe to agree with Karl Rove, he's right about how the Internet is affecting campaign fundraising. "The Internet dramatically shortens the gap between political success and raising money," he wrote. "Today, if you do well in a debate on Tuesday night you can begin raising large sums of money Wednesday morning. Effective fundraising can be a mouse-click away."

That's something that nearly all of the campaigns are doing. Within hours after Obama's win in South Carolina, his campaign had dispatched emails to supporters pitching for donations. However, raising money doesn't win elections. "Raising the most amount of money by no means assures you of winning the presidential primary," says former chairman of the Federal Election Commission Michael Toner. And for Paul, money and online popularity hasn't translated into votes. For Obama, though, arguably his online success has had an impact at the polls.

The reason may be in get out the vote efforts of each party. Both Paul and Obama, with their anti-war stances and Internet savvy, are attractive to young voters. But only the Democrats are succeeding in getting young people to the voting booths. In Iowa, exit polls showed 40% of voters under the age of 44, and Obama killed in those demographics. On the Republican side, just 26% of voters were under 44. That picture was repeated in other early primary states.

Incidentally, this is also potentially the reason that Mike Huckabee has faded as well -- he appeals to young people with, as one South Carolina paper writes, "his celebrity supporters, preacher’s gift for humor and skill with an electric guitar."

The Democrats are succeeding with young people because they are targeting young people and they are using the Internet to successfully microtarget and rally their base. The Obama campaign, for example, uses sophisticated targeting tools that let them send specially tailored campaign materials to each voter. Firm supporters get a different email than those on the fence.

Other progressive organizations are using similar tools. One is called Catalist. It is used by large progressive organizations like MoveOn and the AFL-CIO to microtarget their campaigns. According to Tony DeYoung of Catalyst Resources (unrelated to Catalist -- Catalyst is a design firm that was contracted by Catalist to redesign the UI of their "Q-Tool" software), Catalist utilizes "on-demand data analysis services to help Democratics microtarget in their voter outreach efforts. Microtargeting uses sophisticated computer models regularly used in commercial marketing, which helps campaigns to locate sympathetic voters and target them with individually tailored messages on issues that are predicted to be most important to them."

This is the same technique the Republicans employed to great effect in 2004 to get out messages to conservative evangelical Christian voters -- who this election cycle don't have a clear cut favorite among the front runners. Which may explain why their get out the vote efforts aren't working as well this time around.

So while both Obama and Paul are running effective online campaigns, albeit in different ways, the get out the vote efforts of the Democrats, which target young people, play to Obama's strength. While strong turnout by voters over the age of 45 have played to John McCain on the Republican side.

Related: Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday

On the web, Facebook's debate promo site wasn't very impressive. There was a live comment wall, but with 30,000 comments logged over the course of the night and no context, it felt like trying to watch every Twitter stream on the web at once. In short: it was overwhelming and a bit dizzying.

But even so, things have really picked up on Facebook's political page. ABC is reporting that 1 million users have added their US politics application. It is unclear whether this number is post debate or overall (I'm thinking likely, overall) and because it is an officially sponsored application, Facebook doesn't offer usage metrics for it. But, regardless, the politics section of the site has clearly picked up steam since November. Most polls are now receiving around 10,000 votes and as Obama showed in Iowa, at least on the Democratic side, it might be possible to take some of that Internet support and make it count in the elections. According to a scientific ABC/Facebook poll, 40% of respondents get political information on the Internet, and 2/3rds of those say that information is important in deciding who to vote for.

Why the turn around? Barack Obama might be the reason. Obama has long been the most popular candidate on Facebook. He now has over 210,000 supporters on the site -- up 4,000 since just last night -- and commands 61% of the Democratic attention. His popularity on the site grew almost 20% following his pivotal win in Iowa last week. As we noted after the Iowa caucuses, much of Obama's support in the state came from young voters (under the age of 29), and not surprisingly the majority of US Facebook users are also under the age of 29 (according to their ad targeting tool).

These numbers paint an incredibly rosy picture for Barack Obama, Ron Paul (who has a commanding lead among Facebook Republicans) and Mike Huckabee (who has surged from 8.74% support in November to 18.75% today). Of course, the Republicans will need to get more young voters to the polls than they did in Iowa (where 80% of young voters caucused with the Democrats) in order for Paul to benefit from his online support. (Huckabee, perhaps, has less invested in the youth vote because he also does well in national polls and among evangelical Christian voters.)

Update: We should probably also mention that the ABC-Facebook debate was the most watched of the election cycle to date. The 9.36 million viewers for the Democratic portion nearly triples the most watched Dem debate so far. 2.9 million were in the 25-54 demo -- again nearly triple the previous best. Certainly some of the viewer bump can be attributed to how late in the election cycle we are (this debate may have been perceived as more important). But perhaps Facebook did help push viewers to ABC.

We noted in August, that looking at YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook popularity predicted an eventual head-to-head between Ron Paul and Barack Obama. But in every national poll at the time, neither candidate came out on top. In November, the Compete "Candidate FaceTime" metric showed Paul and Mike Huckabee way out in front, with Obama and Hillary Clinton leading on the Democratic side. The national poll results still don't bear out the online popularity. National polls still have Clinton way ahead of Obama, and Paul in a distant sixth place.

We've speculated that one reason might be that much of the attention anti-war candidates like Obama and Paul are receiving is coming from overseas -- where anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment is generally greater than in the US. American politics are profoundly important across the globe, so people outside of the US pay attention, but though their votes in online straw polls and visits to candidate MySpace pages are counted, they cannot vote in US elections and are left out of local polling.

Yesterday, Hitwise released numbers showing which candidate's official web site was most popular among Iowans. That means these numbers can't be influenced by people from other countries -- this is the Internet election as predicted by the very people who caucus to start the process tonight.

Surprisingly, Iowa predicts wins for Barack Obama and Ron Paul -- both of whom received far more Internet visits from Iowa connected computers in the past month than their next closes rivals (Clinton and Huckabee, respectively). Hitwise is seeing similar results nationally (though with Paul and Huckabee ahead of Obama and Clinton). These results are in line with what the web has been telling us all year.

The latest polls out of Iowa, however, still disagree with what the web predicts. Real Clear Politics, which averages major polls to come up with a single number, shows a statistical dead heat in Iowa between Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. On the Republican site, Huckabee and Mitt Romney are neck and neck, but Paul is sitting in 6th place, well out of contention.

So which is right? While Obama and Paul continue to rack up the wins online, the offline poll numbers show a tougher road to the White House for both. At this point, it's probably best to dispense with the predictions, and guesses, and analysis and wait to see who actually wins in the morning -- then we'll have a clearer picture of how much the Internet matters in campaign politics. At least until Tuesday, when we get to do it all over again in New Hampshire (where, incidentally, Hitwise shows John McCain and Mike Huckabee both leading Ron Paul, and the latest polls have McCain in the lead).

Image via: AAAS.