By John McCormick | Chicago Tribune reporter
11:48 PM CDT, July 8, 2008

Fans use his Web site to rip shifts in policy

The same Internet-fueled power that led to historic gains in organizing and fundraising for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is now providing a platform for fiery dissent in a most unlikely place: his own Web site.

CQ WEEKLY – VANTAGE POINT

Music and politics have a long history: the musicians-cum-activists of the 1960s and ’70s, the Live Aid and Free Tibet concerts in the ’80s and ’90s, and the concert/political fundraisers hosted by Bruce Springsteen and Elton John on behalf of presidential candidates John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Washington Post and other partners like The Guardian plan to help people track and participate in election 2008 coverage.

The http://election.socialmedian.com site aggregates news and user-feeds related to the election and enables users to join in the election coverage and discussion. The Washington Post created the SN site to enable people to track all the election news from thousands of news sources as well as from Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more all in one place, and (importantly) to join-in and add their own feeds from their favorite sites to provide user reports leading up to and on election day.

You can sign up for the page immediately and add your feeds. Add your Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog site etc. and we'll automatically add your relevant contributions on those sites to this page.

Starting Wednesday users will also be able to easily grab a widget of this page to put on your own websites and blogs. The WashingtonPost and The Guardian are just two of the first websites that have signed up to use this widget. The widget will highlight user submitted news and reports. This is a great way to get your election day coverage on these and other leading sites.