There's been lots written about Obama's ability to mobilise legions of supporters, helpers and donors online. He did it through involvement and got people 'into' politics again. But can he do do it day-to-day? Make people feel part of the system? Can he extend the internet's community-building power into government? Yes...er..HE CAN!

People are not always going to agree with you. But they do want you to respond to them, in their language. It's TV soundbites and Punch and Judy that turns them off. The internet enables you to do it.

Slate has a great piece this month....

But that presumes that all of Obama's social-networking friends will support his agendaàand what if that's not the case? What happens when conservatives flock to the White House Web site to post nasty comments opposing Obama's stem-cell policy or if Sean Hannity urges his audience to use the site's tools to plan gatherings protesting Obama's tax plan?

During the campaign, we saw one vivid example of how Obama might handle online protests of his policiesàhe'll let them go on. In June, the senator announced that he had switched positions on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He decided to vote for an updated version of the bill even though it offered immunity to telecom companies that had worked with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, a measure that many of his supporters vehemently opposed.

Protestors immediately took to the campaign's site; a group urging Obama to reject the bill swelled to more than 20,000 members, making it by far the site's largest. Obama didn't change his mind on the eavesdropping bill. But neither did the campaign take any steps to shut down the anti-FISA group, and shortly before voting for the bill, Obama posted a lengthy note to the group explaining why he'd voted for the bill, and his policy staff answered hundreds of comments from the group explaining the nuances of the senator's position.

Alan Rosenblatt, the associate director of online advocacy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, says that if Obama does the same thing while in office, he might be able to blunt some of the inevitable criticism of his proposals. "If there's a level of back-and-forth, it creates a sense of democracy,"