Thousands of young voters organize for Obama on Facebook

[DeepModem Mom]

WP, pg1: Young Voters Find Voice on Facebook
Site's Candidate Groups Are Grass-Roots Politics for the Web Generation
By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 17, 2007; Page A01


College students, from left, Katie Ehlert, Lacey McMullen, Jessica Tobelmann and Amy Divine cheer for Sen. Barack Obama at a Facebook.com event. (By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

Late on the day that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee, Farouk Olu Aregbe logged on to Facebook.com, the popular online community where college students post profiles, share photos and blog. On a whim he created a group called "One Million Strong for Barack."...

Farouk's group had 100 members in the first hour. In less than five days, 10,000. By the third week, nearly 200,000. Yesterday, a month after he created the group, it clocked in 278,100 members.

There are more than 500 Obama groups on Facebook. One of the first, "Students for Barack Obama" was created on July 7 by Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College who first heard of Obama when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Instead of starting "a petition or something" to encourage the freshman senator to run for president, she turned to her Facebook page, created a group and invited people (first her friends, later strangers) to join.

Now it's a political action committee with nearly 62,000 members and chapters in 80 colleges, the most structured grass-roots student movement -- there's a director of field operations, an Internet director, a finance director and a blog team director -- in the presidential campaign so far....A few weeks ago, Segal's group staged a rally at George Mason University that drew an estimated 3,000 students -- and an appearance from Obama himself. This past Sunday, her group's Iowa State University chapter helped promote a rally that attracted more than 5,000.

While the Illinois senator's presidential campaign has outpaced his rivals in the enthusiasm it has generated on Facebook and other social networking sites such as Friendster.com and MySpace.com, no one knows whether such online excitement can translate to votes....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602084.html