The near eclipse of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's presidential campaign is prompting some painful self-examination by a cadre of Internet intellectuals whose early enthusiasm helped attract tens of thousands of volunteers.
The loose-knit group of academics, software writers and online commentators have identified a range of factors responsible for the campaign's stumble, from the actions of Dean himself and former campaign manager Joe Trippi to those of the media establishment.
But some are also blaming their own habitat, what they now describe as an "echo chamber" of Web diaries and Internet message boards that lulled activists into thinking they were winning votes for Dean merely by typing messages to one another.
"We may have been too glued to our monitors to remember that while elections get won by money ... they are also won by people on the ground," John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Internet civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote last week on his personal Web log, or blog.
"We will have to turn off our computers occasionally" to talk to voters in the outside world, he wrote.
The debate's outcome will have major ramifications for the rest of the primary season, the general election in November and future campaigns, participants say. If Internet-based politics just needs fine-tuning, the thought leaders of the virtual world promise to stick around to help figure out how.
"We need to make a careful assessment of what we've learned so far," said Doc Searls, a technology blogger and coauthor of a 2000 bestseller on Web marketing, "The Cluetrain Manifesto." "What's going on here is more like tectonics and geology: It's great shifts taking place underneath everything."
Monday, Searls will join a throng of online mavens at a San Diego conference on "digital democracy" to hash over what went wrong and what can be fixed. Searls and Trippi are scheduled to speak, as are the heads of two Internet outfits that drove Dean's rise from outsider to front-runner. Meetup.com organized face-to-face gatherings of Dean supporters, while the 1.7-million-member activist group MoveOn.org lent a staffer to revamp Dean's innovative Web site and blog.
To many of those who plan to attend the conference, Dean's implosion as the leading candidate resembles the dot-com crash in how much money the campaign raised and then squandered.
