From our CEO… 

I defy anyone to find a day where the Internet is not credited (good or bad) with causing radical change in commerce or our daily lives. My next few posts will delve into some of these stories.

Let's start with Howard Dean. Politics aside, few days go by without some mention of Dean's trajectory being tied directly into Internet fund raising as well as Internet community. How ironic it is that one of the buzzwords of the late 1990s - "community" - is now a buzzword for the Dean campaign. In the late 1990s any fledgling company could go public if it could convince Wall Streeters that its business model would dominate "some community."

Fast forward to today and Howard Dean is showing how valuable a community can be in the political arena. The Dean campaign is setting records for fund raising and it is all about its use of an "Internet community."

Interestingly the model behind the Dean campaign fund raising is based on a few specific software packages as well as a group of people who know how to design Web sites.

The lessons from the Dean campaign can and will be applied to future political campaigns. But I am sure non-profits and commercial organizations will be studying the Dean operation and apply lessons learned for their respective operations.

This leads me to the theme of our new trade show called Internet Planet.
The Dean campaign is really a variation of "growing business online" (the theme and tagline of the Internet Planet trade show). I will have more on this new show, but in the meantime note the press and the myriad stories about how the Internet is changing everything.

[Alan Meckler]