AS predicted, Barack Obama has won the 2008 United States presidential elections and will be installed as the 44th US president in January next year. It is the first time that an African-American has been elected to the White House.

To many observers, the presidential elections also marked another first – the crowning of the Internet as the king of all political media. If television was the new political media in the 1960 US presidential campaign, 2008 is seen as the beginning of the Internet presidency.

If John F. Kennedy managed to win in 1960 with the help of TV, Obama went a step further. Apart from TV, he leveraged on the popularity of the new media – the Internet – to reach out to a wider network of voters, especially the younger and more technology-savvy ones.

Through the Internet and social media platforms such as Friendster and Facebook, his campaign machinery recruited volunteers and supporters. He asked supporters to supply their cell phone numbers and sent out regular text message blasts. He even announced his selection for vice president over text message.

Using a custom social networking site created with the help of a Facebook co-founder, Obama supporters were able to log in and find lists of people they could call or whose doors they could knock on, to try to persuade others to vote for their candidate.

The Obama campaign used Google Maps mashups to help volunteers find local campaign resources and people to contact and try to persuade.

The results: Some 3.2 million people donated to his campaign through its Web site.

In short, the Obama team managed to build the biggest network of supporters ever seen in the history of US presidential campaigns, using the Internet to do it.

Looks like the Internet will feature prominently in future campaigns.

On another note, it will be interesting to see if the use of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies to choose a leader will be a trend in other parts of the world.

For better or worse, politics will never be the same again in the digital age.