Remember in 2003/2004, when everyone made such a big deal of how Howard Dean was using the internet? Not surprisingly, things have changed since then. Now every presidential candidate is using online tools, some more effectively than others.

Champlain College Online Marketing professor Elaine Young is doing a series of blog posts analyzing how 2008 presidential candidates are using social media (i.e. MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, etc.). Because it’s not just about blogs anymore.

Her first post spotlights Democrat Joe Biden. She comments on all his various efforts, and offers a summary judgement:

So the Biden team has a lot of thedifferent social sites covered, but what I don’t see is a lot of actionoverall. I subscribed to the email newsletter and didn’t get anythingin my email for several days. Haven’t seen anything from him on MeetUp, and without creating a full group on Facebook, there’s no way tomessage the members easily. The Facebook site could be juiced up quitea bit and really the goal is to have people recommend to their friends.Overall some good things going on, but not enough to really takeadvantage of the social media.

I’ll never forget how difficult it was to convince my editors that blogs were worth covering back in 2004. We laugh about it now.

Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at...