Big online support, but how effective?

Skeptics of Barack Obama's online popularity ask repeatedly whether the phenomenon will translate into real world votes.

It's one thing, they say, to get people to add the senator as a friend on MySpace and another to generate votes for a candidate.

To Barack's credit, not only can he draw the crowds online but he gets them to show up at his live events. Any politically-savvy person will tell you that's no small thing. Many rallies, even for high-profile offices like this, are packed with inside people -- political aides, lobbyists, etc.

However, it's not difficult to see how a smaller group of experienced politcal backers can outwork a much larger mass of supporters consisting largely of people who've never been involved in politics before.

In a self-organizing scenario, you will have many disparate local groups of people spending time and energy reinventing the wheel just to get up and running.

Without a lot of self-starters and direction from the center they may be minimally engaged and active early on, while the "pros" are already doing focused work identifying supporters, persuading swing voters, setting up get-out-the-vote, etc.

When the novices do activate, the approach may be unfocused most of the time, and they may not hit many of the voters they should be targeting. It's like scoring only one of 1o jump shots, while you're opponent may be sinking 50 percent.

However, at the same time one can't discount the euphoria of stardom. We've seen many times how a first-time candidate Hollywood celebrity can enter the political world and wipe out established campaign machines.

Old-fashioned canvassing and even paid tv campaigns are no match for the viral qualities of true stardom.

While no one doubts Obama's star qualities, there are still many people who don't know him. His supporter's challenge is presenting their candidate to these people.

One good thing about a mass of grassroots support is you can activate it many times, while you can generally spend any quantity of money only once. Obama supporters need to reactivate themselves repeatedly over the whole primary season.

They need to master the art of publicity -- the conduit of their candidate's star appeal -- but at the same time they must learn how to identify and focus on targeted voters particularly those who are undecided going into the latter weeks before election day.