"Why did people invest so much money in companies with no business plans? They got excited about the ideas," said Dave Winer, a prominent Silicon Valley programmer and blogger now at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
"You're looking at exactly the same thing. People gave money because they were excited about the idea that a candidate might use the Net to communicate with the electorate."
Specific business and political disasters notwithstanding, Winer said the underlying beliefs of the Dean supporters eventually would be borne out -- just like those of the dot-com investors in the 1990s.
"On the dot-com thing, they were right. It was the way of the future," she said.
The Dean campaign attracted many technologists who, like Winer, didn't have long histories as political activists. Though most hoped to see Bush defeated, they said they were drawn in less by Dean the candidate and more by the promise of a new process in campaigning and governing.
Some who considered themselves politically agnostic contributed software, expertise, money and words of praise. That helped Dean rake in an unprecedented amount in small donations. It also resulted in a list of more than 600,000 e-mail addresses and an enthusiastic base of supporters who met each other, wrote letters or even traveled to Iowa to knock on doors in the cold.
Unfortunately for Dean, many supporters didn't get beyond the social connections.
"Barlow is right about the echo chamber," said Winer, who developed software that sent Dean news to thousands of subscribers. "There were a lot of people who thought it was about dating."
Winer added: "Will the Internet bring more people out for elections? Yeah. Do I know how? No. But this is what makes it fun."
With Dean still in the race, most of his semifamous supporters from the Internet aren't talking openly about who they might back next. Asked instead which other candidates are making the most of the Web, they often bring up retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
Thus far, the most-followed Net opinion makers have found plenty to blame beside themselves.
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law expert and Dean advisor who wrote admiringly about Trippi's Internet innovations, said he was stunned by the campaign's heavy spending in Iowa and New Hampshire. Dean, who has failed to score a victory in any of the nine presidential contests thus far, has acknowledged spending nearly all of the $41 million he had raised as of last year.
