Obama Internet whizzes barely had iPhones at the start

The brains behind Barack Obama's Internet campaign revealed Friday they had just one smart phone between them the day their unlikely high-tech revolution began. In a first public discussion since last month's historic election, new media director Joe Rospars, online director Scott Goodstein and blogging supremo Sam Graham-Felsen all referred to a "tidal wave" of online voter activism. They did this by embracing the gamut of new media tools, from YouTube to e-mail lists, from blogs to Facebook, and by putting an Obama platform on iPhones so that users could recruit contacts to the cause. The result, says Micah Sifry, co-founder of politics blog TechPresident, was a "mass participation revolution" that appears set to continue after Obama is inaugurated on January 20. Goodstein said that new media is in politics to stay. "I think the cat's out of the bag."