Now that Obama has won the US election decisively, it's a good time to look at his new media strategy and how he plans to keep that strategy moving.

Firstly, Obama not only raised far more money via the internet, he also spent far more than McCain on it. This approach clearly paid off, with Obama's support amongst younger voters much higher than the GOP. McCain's campaign relied more on broadcast media. McCain also had to deal with a more problematic spending plan - while Obama was able to simply spend the money on the larger campaign, McCain and the RNC had to split the money amongst the presidential campaign and the endangered Senate seats.

Even Fox News, a key part of the Republican noise machine, went cold on the Republican campaign with owner Rupert Murdoch coming out in support of Obama. The divisive tactics of Rush Limbaugh and the right wing blogosphere failed to make much of a dent, and their hyperventilating desperation certainly did them no favours. The right wing press is slowly collapsing, with 'wingnut welfare' funders pulling out and dubious bulk-ordering scams being made public. Cable is feeling the swing too, with left-wing firebrand Keith Olbermann outrating right-wing firebrand O'Reilly for the first time.

The obvious indicators of Obama's plans are the Change.gov website and his weekly Youtube 'fireside chats'. The Youtube chats are testimony to Obama's canny ability to use new media technology with strong historical resonances to appeal to younger, technically literate voters as well as older voters. The obvious reference to FDR's fireside chats harks back to a time when citizens were concerned about the Great Depression, and FDR was reaching out for political support for the New Deal - the similarities aren't hard to see. (Olbermann's done something similar, appropriating Ed Murrow's 'Good night, and good luck' on his endlessly forwarded screeds against George W Bush and the Republican party.) It's worth comparing Obama's approach to Bush Jr's reluctance to engage with the public; in Bush's first term he held very few press conferences.

Obama will no doubt face challenges opening up the government to public interaction. He's already had to deal with the possibility of losing his Blackberry and will have to deal with the security and workflow issues of being President of the USA. Similarly, using Youtube without allowing interaction isn't particularly open and restricting your administration to people who've never been embarrassed online is pretty restrictive. Hopefully this will change once Obama takes office.

Social media and Australian politics

Over this side of the pond politicians are still a bit behind the US. The Greens are continuing their pre-election strategy of using blogs and Twitter to reach out to constituents, and Senator Scott Ludlam has used Twitter and the Greensblog to draw on the expertise of technical experts, web developers and IT specialists on the absolutely inane Internet censorshipproposal.

His work, and the constant debate around the proposal has helped separate the FUD spread by Conroy from the facts. Conroy's attempts to paint people opposed to the cleanfeed as supporters of child pornography have fallen flat, and bloggers have pointed out that censorship proposal is in fact nothing like the European models put forward, and is much more in line with the Chinese and Burmese models. As anyone who has worked online or who has a curious technically literate teenager in the house knows, technical fixes are always avoidable, and governmental censorship is no replacement for actual parenting. The censorship proposal would also impact heavily on Australia's already sub-par internet speeds - not exactly the kind of development Australia needs if it wants to be a player in the knowledge economy. (Check out the rage around the proposal here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nocleanfeed)

Being open to the public is much easier when you are not running the country, as Malcolm Turnbull and the Greens have shown. Kevin Rudd's belated response on Twitter (http://twitter.com/kevinruddpm) and http://www.kevinpm.com.au is disappointing, given his early adoption of social media technologies. However, as we watch Kevin Rudd getting back on the bandwagon and the political fallout of Obama's win in the USA, we can take comfort that early adopters are giving the political process a boot up the proverbial, and thanks to Obama, nerds are hot.

Barry Saunders is the research coordinator for Democratic Renewal at the Centre for Policy Development. He is doing a PhD in social media at QUT and blogs at investigativeblog.net.