Politics 2.0

The Obama campaign made significant strides in reaching out to its community during the campaign for the 2008-2012 office.   This was largely due to the social media reach and web 2.0 marketing campaign of the supporters who were recruited to manage the campaign digitally; but, also of note was the use of newer methods of visualizing data gathered through web 2.0 functions.  

One advantage of web 2.0 technology that made this so effective is that resources typically allocated to manage a campaign could now be laser-focused on issues that required personal attention, while the web 2.0 campaign basically managed itself through dynamic tagging of campaign issues.  

With the advent of hash-tagging and word-cloud visualization technology, the issues that potential voters wanted to see addressed could be brought to the fore-front in real time, thus changing the dynamic of the campaign so rapidly that the people actually could feel represented.  This likely led to a campaign advantage the likes of which had not been seen prior to the digital age. Because of the use of trending and tagging, constituents who visited these pages always saw the key concerns rising to the top, so it appeared at all times that the Obama administration was on top of them. 

Below is a short example of how a word cloud, or tag cloud works and can be used to quickly determine trends.

Source: Whitehouse.gov
State of the Union Speech, 2011.

As you can see, having quick, visual access to frequently occurring ideas and trends can allow one to focus quickly on what is most relevant, rather than sorting through data fields and respondent's text messages.

Technology like this has set the stage of the future interaction in many types of media, from digital advertising and social tagging, to crowd-sourced campaigns for product development.  
I think word clouds and tag clouds are here to stay.