President Obama staged an 80-minute interactive town hall meeting this morning at 11:30 EDT. In the span of an hour or so, he received 92,000 questions online, from which 3.6 million votes were cast voting up/down those questions.

Idea: his administration should create a “White House Connect” application based on a white label Google Friend or Facebook Connect type system. White House Connect could be set up as a governmental social network, that could be extended on national, state and local levels.

Benefits of an Obama Induced Online Society

President Obama has the opportunity to push American society online, with the following benefits to his wired administration:

1. Easier to broadcast messages to a tech savvy media and public, constituents who likely comprise a hotbed of Obama supporters.
2. Engages the public and gives them a feeling of connectedness with his administration.
3. Positions Obama as a populist president using a variety of media, from Jay Leno, to the internet, to communicate his messages as a “real” person, not somebody isolated in an inner sanctum.

In a similar vein, the South Korean government pushed its citizens after the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis to adopt broadband and the Internet, and became a global Internet powerhouse.

I sometimes ruminate over new concepts for 24 hours to figure out their implications rather than jot down a quick “yowza” blog post. CNN.com and Facebook’s integrated coverage of the Obama Inaugural yesterday was striking because it was the first time I saw all my Facebook friends come to life in a unified, mostly coherent conversation.

In social network applications like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, conversations are siloed. I don’t feel a part of the ecosystem until somebody or I start a conversation. An event like the Inauguration lays down a contextual foundation for the conversation so everybody feels involved. It’s the reason why we go to live sporting or concert events – Facebook provided a proxy for “being there” by gathering all the people I know (at least on Facebook) in one room.

This is one of the powerful applications of Facebook Connect that will surely be used in connection with other events, live or programmed (as in movie watching), to provide the same social experience by proxy. Yes, the conversations may be boring or obnoxious, but that’s like any other cocktail party. I think this is addictive.

YouTube has huge media advantages over mainstream media:

1. It’s free. Buying airtime is way expensive.
2. It has global reach. Airtime only reaches a regional broadcast area.
3. It’s viral. Anybody can embed YouTube messages like I’ve done.

It’s time to call YouTube the uber-network, it transcends TV and cable. Barack Obama has endorsed it for his weekly addresses to the people:

The auto industry, care of GM’s PR group, has also made its plea on YouTube:

Note that Barack and GM have followed the “sound bite” rule – 4 minutes tops to keep our peripatetic consumer focus.

Final thought: Advertising can be served up free on YouTube and other online video services, and people can comment on them freely. Multimillion dollar national TV ad campaigns become budget-challenged in this economy, and ad agencies start looking like candidates for disintermediation.

Love this stuff…

One Presidential debate should be hosted on Comedy Central and start off with comedic monologues. Humor puts some of the peripheral issues like comparing McCain to Bush in context much better than just trying to explain it seriously. John McCain turns out to be an excellent non-angry and gracious comedian, revealing a sympathetic character that he hasn’t shown during his campaign.

YouTube got it up within a few hours of the Al Smith Foundation dinner:

Update 10/16/08 11:30pm PDT: Steven Weber at Huffington Post agrees with me that this funny John McCain is the way he should have run his candidacy. Fire his handlers! Al Gore had the same “serious” problem in 2000, and we found out he was funny too.

CNN reports that 2/3 of the public don’t want to see another debate. After #3, I don’t either because the rhetoric unceremoniously petrified into refrains of “McCain is Bush” and “Obama will raise taxes”.

The debate reactions are more transparent with real time polling on CNN by their pundits and by commentary from Election Twitter and Friendfeed 2008 Elections. The effect of real time feedback is the immediate dissection of the debate second by second instead of waiting for pundits to interpret it for us later.

Election 2008 permanently changes the political landscape by giving the public voice, in theory, equal footing with the mass media. With the social media, ordinary folks like Joe the Plumber can become instantly famous (h/t Duncan Riley The Inquisitr)

The verticalization of Twitter continues, as it should. Twitter can be too broad population to effectively filter out vertical conversations.

Micro-blogging is the best medium at this time to aggregate user generated conversations along topics. Election.Twitter is a simple application but provides a hyper-real time view on the mood of the political nation. The mainstream media will understand this utility soon, and court prominent Twitterers by topic.

LA Times reports the Obama campaign has confirmed an announcement for VP and plans to distribute his choice by email and text message. Of course, they encourage the public to join their network for updates by submitting their contact information, which will get them on Obama’s drip email marketing list, complete with donation appeals. The LAT steps in to promote their own Twitter feed to get Election 2008 updates:

(Now, this commercial message: If you would rather receive instant notification of Obama’s vice presidential choice via The Ticket — free –  along with all new blog items 24 hours a day, you can enroll here:

(For existing Twitterers, go to http://twitter.com/latimestot

(Click Follow. Enroll there for alerts on every new Ticket item AND our instant, breaking-news items whenever and wherever anything is happening in the presidential race. And it’s all free, of course.

(For about-to-be Twitter folks, think of it as text message headlines to any mobile device. Go here to enroll. Click on Join, not surprisingly. RSS feeds also available here.)