Kurt Weinsheimer of Spot Runner, Becki Donatelli and Rob Kubasko from the McCain campaign and Sam Graham-Felsen and Joe Rospars of the Obama campaign are speaking about the web and politics with Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin.

You should be able to watch the live stream of the panel HERE.

Rospars: Obama, Axelrod and Plouffe all got the importance of technology and mobilizing the grassroots. From day one, it was important that we had the website up on the day he announced his candidacy in Springfield. We put the website together in 10 days. [...]

Obama and Michelle kept saying "If we're going to be successful, it's going to have to be organic, bottom-up."

The beginning of the liveblog is below the fold...

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Rob Kubasko just said that early voting has rendered the old school "72 hours GOTV" machine that the Republican Party is known for completely obsolete. "This election was lost 3 weeks before election day. Now you need to put out your final argument a month out." True.

Rospars: The greatest use of Facebook we exploited were the applications. You can do all sorts of things. When people shared video or other content, when they clicked on an application, we could show them their friends in Iowa or their friends who could early vote starting today, and ask them to contact them.

Becki has been working in online politics since McCain's 2000 campaign, which Joe Trippi has said inspired him in 04.

Donatelli: In 2004, there were 2 lessons learned: Dean's meet-ups and Bush campaign's use of online tools to microtarget for the last 72 hour turnout machine. Our campaign probably took the wrong lesson from that. We spent way too much time speaking to the media. We should have used our technology to speak to supporters.

Ben: You've said you didn't invent technology so much as you perfected what was already out there. So what's next?

Rospars: We tried a lot of things. We were conservative about what we were willing to try. We had more than a million people registered for the first time online. There's a lot more to be done with that. Same with the online voter contact tools, to get people to knock on doors or make calls from home in a more systematic and efficient way. For example, 15% of all people who participated in the Iowa caucus looked up their caucus location on our website. Leading up the the general, when people looked up their precinct location, we also showed them contact info for 5 people who were in their same precinct to contact. If they're looking up where to vote, we're fairly sure they're going to vote. We needed to get them to take the next step.

Donatelli: I would like to see us do more 1 on 1 video, from the candidate directly to the people, as Sarkozy did.

Martin asked how you're going to reach the casual voter when TV is going to become more and more diminished as an influential medium.

Sam: Diverse video, which is what we tried to do.

Kubasko: Using mobile technology.

We found that the people who were excited about John McCain from 2000 just weren't there for us in 2008. We had to create a whole new universe of John McCain supporters. We thought the maverick brand was going to be very strong but it just didn't connect anymore.

Donatelli: McCain not only gets what we do, he gets it ahead of what we do. Let me be the first to dispel the idea that John McCain did not know what we were doing or appreciate what we were doing.

Wow, Becki Donatelli is really defensive about McCain. It's pretty funny.

Haha, Ben Smith just called Sam's BO blog "very well-read but not that interesting." Sam's response: "What's boring to the Politico is not boring to our supporters."

Jon Martin just said Obama's emergence discredited the liberal blogosphere. What!? Rospars just said "I would dispute the premise."

Good.

"There's no constituency group that is going to agree with the candidate all of the time."

Martin: "Are they diminished now?"

Rospars: "Again I would dispute the premise."

Ben just asked Sam about the blogosphere's organizing against Barack's support for warrantless wiretapping. "Did you listen to them?"

Sam: "We definitely listened. I was in touch every day with dozens of bloggers about this. Barack issued a serious statement and took them very seriously. I'm going to take my lumps from you this time but I do care what you think. I think they appreciated how seriously he took them."

"Do you think it was wise of them to organize on your site?"

"Yes."