Why Elections Have Been Changed Forever — And No, It’s Not The Black or The Babe Thing.

2004 seems like soooo 4 years ago. But in election years, that’s actually an entire generation. Or two. Because what happened in the 1460 days between Kerry-Bush and Obama-McCain was something that changed the course of every election forever.

Social Media.

During the 2004 Election season, there was no:

• YouTube (2005)
• Facebook (2006)
• Twitter (2006)
• MySpace was up and running in 2003 but it was largely a music-oriented Friendster.
• Digg was founded in 2004, after the election.
• The Huffington Post was founded in May, 2005.
• Politico was founded in 2007.
• Pioneering site Technorati was just beginning to cover the exploding blogosphere in 2004.
• RSS, which made every voter a potential publisher, wasn’t widely known until 2005.
• The term Crowdsourcing cropped up in a Wired story in 2006.
• While Howard Dean had his hefty email list in 2004, no one had a list of three million + cell phone numbers with which to introduce the new Vice Presidential candidate.

And importantly, way back in 2000 and 2004, there was no instant way to report problems with voting as there is this year via Wired’s special election day service.

Or to keep every single moment of Election Day uber-transparent. Click here to follow the election via Twitter.

Here’s an idea I love from iStrategy Labs founder Peter Corbett: Will text messages someday be the twenty-first century version of FDR’s Fireside Chats?

Guru’s Note: Interestingly, the first of FDR’s Fireside Chats was about ‘The Banking Crisis.’