I was on some news program a few weeks ago talking about Barack Obama's YouTube videos and Hillary's online live chats, and at the end of the segment I said that the Internet empowers Regular-Joe candidates by giving them free access to a huge chunk of potential voters. The thing is, Obama and Hillary have tons of cash to run "real" political campaigns with slick TV spots and so on. They're taking the free route not to save cash but to reach YOU instead of the oldsters who watch the nightly news. If you're online, you're engaged, and politicians dig that.

Step 2: Keep a blog, but make it good. Link-baity lists like "17 Reasons to Enforce Anti-Spam Legislation" are good; "10 Reasons Mac Users Should Vote for Me" is better. Make sure you have a credible (yet hip) blogroll. And use ClipMarks to post snippets and ideas from around the Web and other blogs, to show that you can both talk and listen.