The New Politics Institute has just put out a white paper on Mobile Media in 21st Century Politics. The white-paper was prepared by Tim Chambers and Rob Sebastian of the Media 50 Group, a new player on the mobile political field and one who#039s founders, like Politxt, comes from a plethora of mobile experience in the entertainment space.

The Washington Post continues to out-do The New York Times in its coverage of the intersection of technology and politics. Two recent examples of smart reporting from the Post: Jeffrey Birnbaum's piece on "Targeting Likely Advocates With Web Ads," and William Booth's piece on Robert Greenwald's net-centric approach to financing and distributing his political documentaries, "His Fans Greenlight His Films."

Birnbaum's story gives us a fresh take on how some well-heeled players are using technology to better game the system, i.e., to empower themselves in a top-down way. Want to build a list of citizens who will help your cause? Fine-tuned Internet advertising can get you folks, but it will cost you $5 per advocate, Birnbaum reports. The somewhat creepy example he gives is of a campaign run that OnPoint Advocacy of Democracy Data & Communications ran for the American Medical Association.

My friends at New York's Working Families Party have launched a smart way to engage their members in a very net-centric way of rolling out their online advertising this fall--they've emailed about 18,000 of the most active members of their 58,000 state list to ask their help in picking the best Google search terms to use in focusing attention on Congressional campaigns.

Writes WFP online organizer Steve Perez, "We want help shaping our strategy. We need to know what phrases people are likely to use when they search for election information. So here's the question - if you wanted to know more about the Congressional race where you live, what would you type into Google?"

Perez is smart; he's tapping into the power of his activist network to fight a net-war for attention. And at the same time he's educating his activist base about a new tool in modern media battles, the search engine. He writes:

The theme of Esther Dyson's annual PC Forum conference this year is "Erosion of Power: Users in Charge," but as I listened to this morning's panel on "Behavioral Targeting 2.0," I found myself wondering if there was an unintended double meaning in the word "users."

Arvind Rajan, President and CEO of Grassroots Enterprise, talked about how his company has developed a thriving business generating grass-roots activity around issues being debated in Washington. He noted that their clients included the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association and the Republican National Committee, adding, "Most of our business has been corporations and trade associations seeking to influence what goes on in Washington."