I went to a talk by David Theo Goldberg who also heads up the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute). His talk wasn’t about networked politics, but he repeatedly mentioned flash mobs as a new political phenomenon and then he went on to praise the long blog entry Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics by Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop, the company whose wiki-like collaboration software was used by Obama to organize California. The blog entry is one of the best explanations of the Obama phenomenon I’ve come across.