From the Global Human Capital Journal comes a study all media should evaluate: How Barack Obama's campaign team leveraged Web 2.0 to build support for his candidacy.

It's a thorough examination of the tools his team employed, how it outflanked better-financed and better-known competitors, and ultimately what lessons there are.

Among those lessons:

1. Standard-bearers need to respect the ability of stakeholders to organize and make a lot of noise. Trust them.
2. Web 2.0 happened faster with Obama than even his campaign expected, so its effects ought to spread faster in 2009 than businesses expect. Disruption is imminent.
3. Consider yourself part of an ecosystem and design plans involving social media.
4. Get to transparency and openness with stakeholders.
5. Think small and roll up many such achievements into big numbers.

Even relative geezers like me understand there is something afoot in the way media are being dissembled and reconstructed by consumers --- find a piece here, get a search result there, a send-to-a-friend, get-from-a-friend couple of clicks, and you've got an adequate fill of information to form a view.
The U.S. presidential race is the best petri dish to study for any such new pattern of consumption, so today's New York Times story is welcome information on how younger voters are replacing conventional filters (CNN, Washington Post, even itself) with social media. They're sharing content like never before.
It's clear that the enthusiasts of social media have new ways to distribute content among themselves. Some see this as one more sign that the traditional media are on borrowed time, but it's also clear that someone has to generate and edit content. How that content is distributed and shared might decide how well it is financed, but the challenge for conventional media is to determine how to (not if it should) participate.