geek stuff

Barack Obama's Internet operation is beginning to resemble a mid-sized tech startup with 8 figures of Sand Hill Road money more than it is a political campaign. The Obama Internet team hit the ground running with ten staffers in February 2007, including Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Don't be surprised to see them recruit more tech and data geeks for the general, including former Clintonistas and from Silicon Valley.

Their raw work product -- even beyond the stunning online fundraising results -- is impressive. One of my hobbies since January has been taking screengrabs of every interesting new page or feature on the candidate websites and posting them to my Flickr account. The threshold for inclusion was simple: pages that in my experience as an online staffer took more than a few man-hours to produce. This is a living archive, even the deep-linked pages 5 or 6 levels down, that will go on long after the sites are taken down or redesigned. 

The level of detail on the Obama site is nothing short of phenomenal. You've got individual microsites built for Pennsylvania Neighborhood Teams, West Virginia Faith Captains, Oregon Community Organizers This is not stuff plopped in off some template, but stuff that only a large team can produce.

John McCain is never going to have the resources to do this kind of deep dive on his website. But he doesn't have to.