Presidential Campaign 2.0

With Barack Obama having announced his intentions to run for president on YouTube, the campaign before the campaign is starting to heat up. Recently John Edwards invited citizen journalists and bloggers to join him on the campaign trail. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, A-list blogger Robert Scoble was part of the gang and interviewed the Senator about his intentions. And the McCains and Clintons will follow as the pressure continues to build to include bloggers, vloggers, wiki producers, podcasters and OhMyNews journalists as a target audience.

The media has always been a major part of a presidential race. This time, it'll even be bigger. In our day day and age, almost everybody can be a (citizen) journalist or a publisher of news and information. The number of influencers has skyrocketed.

So, if I am not sure who to believe and, in the end, vote for - who do I listen to along the way? The political correspondent of a big time newspapers, the same person on his or her personal blog which expresses more personal opinions, my neighborhood podcast where Suzie, my neighbor voices her political views, the campaign ads on TV which I mute anyway or the wannabe political videogapher on YouTube who gives me his or her two cents about each candidate?

Let me know. I'd be curious to find out!