McCain Girl and The Enchanted Republican Forest, BarelyPolitical.

Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience, TechCrunch.

Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Obama's 'Cybergenic' Edge: How McCain and Obama Operate in Cyberspace Could Determine Election's Outcome, ABC News.

Hillary Clinton lost to Obama because her campaign didn't take cyberspace seriously. In early 2007, I found myself at a dinner with Clinton chief strategist Mark Penn and, asking him about his cyber-strategy, I was astounded to hear him scorn the idea that Hillary would ever blog. Perhaps if she had, the race would have played out differently.