The key development in 2008 will be the continuing rise of local blogs. National blogs have been successful in influecing the national media.  This has been less the case with local blogs.

I think in 2008 local blogs will begin to influence local coverage.  

The challenge will be to integrate the local efforts with the national effort.

I think cell phones have underutilized potential for netroots activists and campaigns alike.  They're a portable way to send and receive information quickly, and now that video is available I expect their use to explode sometime in 2008.

I also agree with Fladem about local blogs.  We've already seen what they can do in places like Connecticut.  I think local sites can have a huge impact on Congressional races next cycle, especially since local media regularly does such a lousy job of covering local politics.

I continue to maintain my personal theory that all internet technology developments come from the adult entertainment world. Live chats, webcams, secure pay technology, etc. all got their widespread start with porn.

Hell adult film star Jenna Jameson has 1,026,711 friends on MySpace.

Now I don't personally frequent those kind of sites, so you'd have to ask someone else about what the latest developments are on them."

SKYPE

I installed it last night for my 16 year old daughter...Her friend is off to England and she wants to talk with him..

My daugher has grown  up in the digital world.. Blogs ( her school is teaching Shakespeare using blogs)mps, online courses...

But the chat feature of Skype blew us way

SoapBlox more than MySpace... come on!

I get no love :P.

In larger cities, here in San Francisco for instance, I predict the rollout of free wifi will have a large effect. This may or may not be in place in time for 2008.

I can see the existence a free city-wide high speed connection as having an effect like youtube on steroids. Coupled with cgg's idea of cell phones, instant access could turn into instant action.

Will TV become participatory?  That's the big nut to crack.

Consider online petitions -- we used one quite effectively in the fight to retain progressive radio in Madison, gathering 5400 signatures. We used an all-purpose site that just about anyone can figure out, but which does not forward petition-signers eMail addresses to the petition initiators. That's a problem. I see the Columbus and Boston groups fighting for progressive radio have set up their own petitions, good move.

I agree with respect to skype. They're still innovating, the service still either free or dirt cheap and the feature set keeps growing.

Virtual reality spaces like SecondLife are maturing, and provide opportuities for on-the-fly virtual meetings that are more productive than chat rooms, and much cheaper than video teleconferencing.

But all group meeting systems are getting cheaper, which will facilitate progressive team building.

....the only thing they truly understand about the internet is that lefties use it to hurt them. They're an authoritarian government that is arguably within spitting distance of a dictatorship, those never respond well to innovative and evolving threats on things like the internets.

Loved reading all the comments, I really don't get why cell phones haven't been used in America as efficiently as in lots of other countries.

A fairly new website -- Stickam -- is quite trendy and sure does offer a lot of potential.

I think the most important change will be one of strategy that Web 2.0 has forced. I think too many of the assumptions that most consultants and politicians use as a starting point have been circumvented by technology. Unfortunately, while I think many of us grasp the potential here, I still think the whole online conventional wisdom gap that Bowers has written about is wide (both a problem and potential, especially in primaries).

Also, while in the last presidential cycle it was the Dean movement that drove innovation, this time around is think innovation will be proven in small races (many of us Californians are going to try it here).

One other interesting dynamic is that a lot of online activists have known a lot of other online activists for a long time. We've fought together (and eachother sometimes) and not only has technology enabled these bonds, but longevity has strengthened them.

And when it comes to the potential for unbelievable disruption, I think 2008 may see the end of balloons at campaign events...

I don't know that we're going to see any fundamental breakthrough online technologies. We're likely to see lots of tactical innovation in the coordinated use of several technologies that have emerged over the last several years.

For instance, too many senior political operatives continue to think of YouTube as a novelty. They don't understand that YouTube and similar services have shaken the TV broadcasters very hard to their core. They are changing their business models because of YouTube. For campaigns in '07 and '08, rather than trying to figure out what the "next YouTube" is, I'd spend my time on figuring out how to actually use YouTube well in a consistent and strategic way.    

Similarly with Myspace. There are hundreds of millions of people with myspace accounts. Niche comedian Dane Cook has over a million friends on myspace. There's no reason a political figure with the broad name recognition of say a "Bill Clinton" or "Al Gore" couldn't have five or ten million friends on myspace. Now imagine if they then took the time to actually use a myspace network to bring attention to important but obscure causes.

In terms of relatively new stuff, I suspect you'll see more innovation with respect to RSS (imagine if each of your campaign workers could publish their own rss feed), interactive content delivery to cell phones, and CRM and work collaboration technologies like SalesForce.com and BaseCamp.

OpenID and FOAP (Friend of a Friend, sort of a decentralized profile standard for social networks).  OpenAcademic is working on something that could benefit is us all.  It's looking to integrate drupal (CMS), Elgg (social network), MediaWiki, and Moodle (courseware) via OpenID

OpenID (which is rolling out this month in beta)

Slow down there, Turbo!

OpenID has been functionally "rolled out" for a couple of years, ever since Brad Fitzpatrick of livejournal showed it can scale in production, and it's been available for decent community-supported open-source projects like  Joomla and Drupal for a while.

I think you mean your project (scoop fork?) is going beta with OpenID support. That's cool, and it's nice that your pushing the protocol, but you really aught not to make it sound like you invented this or are taking credit for it or anything. It's bad for the ol' credibility, not to mention disrespectful to the people who have been working on/with OpenID for years. I'm sure you didn't mean anything like that, but it's just sloppy, you know?

There's a time and a place for razzle-dazzle and sales-pitching, and I'm well aware of the coalition effort to raise the profile of OpenID -- which is awesome -- but I'd personally much rather you made MyDD a part of that effort, rather than just another place to spew marketing. Maybe it's just me, but that's part of what this site is all about.

Just so everyone knows, there are pre-built libraries for every major language (even .NET!) that are freely available. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people over the years, these libraries make  it easy to use OpenID in apache, plone, media wiki and lots lots more!

There is also a pretty decent community of OpenID evangelists who are working on building a Free (as in Speech) identity layer for the internet, which is what this is all about.

This is why it's cool, because just about any community will be able to become an identity provider. There will be zero chance of a monopoly, which is disappointing to a lot of people who thought they'd be able to own a piece of the identity layer and set up a nice little tollbooth. Every platform can (and should) support this and it will enable a functional yet decentralized network for identity, reputation and authority, which is a Good Thing(tm).

Look -- last year, at this time, YouTube was barely being used.  It'll happen, and then we'll know, but I've been following this stuff for twenty years (since I started using local BBSes), and no one has ever been able to fully fathom or comprehend the next step.  Hell, just work on the idea that users themselves would create most of the content on the web, as opposed to corporations and programmers.  Blogger.com was not inevitable.

Widgets!

Little Flash or AJAX widgets that can do and display something dynamically, posted simply by copy and pasting some code into a blog sidebar, a social network profile, or a signature.

Example widgets could be created for fundraising from friends, RSVPing to house parties, signing up to Candidate X's email list, etc. Each widget will have a dynamic counter (I've raised X, or X of my friends are coming to this house party).