Peter Leyden's blog

Here is a very intense multimedia talk I gave in Copenhagen in October that explained the whole Obama phenonenon in historical context. The title was: "The Obama Moment: How New Technologies and New Media are Changing Politics and Soon Government." It's an excellent quality video can boils down how big a deal his election is. The first 30 minutes is the formal talk, and the rest discussion. As I told the Europeans, hang on for the ride. This story has just begun...

I came across this endorsement of Obama by Tim O'Reilly, who is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., which hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim is an extremely respected tech leader and his lengthy endorsement is very thoughtful and convincing. Instead of badgering him to make an endorsement on this website, I give you the link and the top of the essay below:

In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world's great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to "work on stuff that matters."

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The Merc News of Silicon Valley compared the presidential candidates in a recent story and dug deep to come up with reasons that the tech industry might be interested in McCain as well as Obama. It was utterly unconvincing, but did provide some numbers that make the Obama case.

One metric is: Follow the money.  As the story said: “The non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics found that tech-industry political action committees, entrepreneurs and employees gave Obama four times as much money as they gave McCain.” That would seem to be an indication of preference.

The chart that accompanied the story shows a breakdown between the two candidates by company. Pretty lopsided right down the line. Google stuck out: $485,961 for Obama, and $20,600 for McCain. That works  out to Obama getting 23 times as much.

I believe Barack Obama has been the driving force in creating nothing short of a paradigm shift in politics. He and his campaign have used technology to create a paradigm shift in fundraising (from the wealthy few to the middle-class many), in organizing (from the party insiders to decentralized citizens), and in media (from total reliance on expensive 30-second TV spots to powerful use of viral new media.) Obama and his team deeply and viscerally understand the power of technology because they know they would not have won the primaries without it. From everything I can see in their proposed ideas and policies, they intend to fully leverage technology beyond electoral politics to help transform government and take on the massive challenges of this country and the world. America needs to make technology-enhanced paradigm shifts in energy, in education, in healthcare, among many other areas. We need to finally and fully transition the American economy and society to thrive in the global, interconnected 21st century world.

This is a talk that I gave in late July at the Momentum conference in San Francisco where I made the case that Obama might be catalyzing a rare moment in American history - an explosive period of political and social innovation. Technology is one of the key drivers of this moment and Obama is using it to pull off a paradigm shift in politics. The whole talk is done in the quick-paced multi-media style of the TED conference, and is 20 mintues long. You can find a longer and later version of this talk elsewhere on the site.