Why everyone's a winner

It was, as the Sun might say, the web wot won it. Barack Obama's election was one in which the world felt involved and it wasn't just because of the historic nature of the election or the power of the job. I lost count of the number of times I've had to fight back the tears watching viral videos and the numbers suggest I wasn't alone.

Obama's campaign team is everywhere online: YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, whose co-founder Chris Hughes worked for the campaign from early last year. They mobilised supporters and organised communities, registering 1.5 million volunteers through myBarackObama.com and raising $600m from 3 million people. Obama's campaign also built a consensual database of 3m mobile numbers by promising that in return, supporters would get campaign news before the media. And so they did almost immediately with the announcement of Joe Biden as vice-presidential candidate. "It was a masterclass in political campaigning - a high water mark," says Mark Flanagan, head of strategic communications for No 10. "They have built on the lessons from Howard Dean, and let people build their own networks. myBarackObama.com was inspired." Obama even managed to pull off intimate discussions with major donors over dinner, posted to the campaign's YouTube account. "He's just a fantastic political communicator. There's no sense of artifice - just a melding of the candidate and the human being," says Flanagan.

The web is built on technology that is primarily for communication, and not publishing. That dynamic is the source of its power and, crucially, its intimacy. What social media represents - and what fed Obama's victory - is a direct engagement and communication between friends, contacts and families. When we share ideas, opinions and information they become part of that intimate, trusted network in our own small corner of the internet. Our subconscious is hard-wired to assume that faces we see regularly are our own friends (explaining our preoccupation with celebrity), and so we feel that we know Obama because we've spent so much time with him. Yet it was a massive night for TV when the results broke on Tuesday. Glued to the live TV screens in Chicago's Grant Park, one reveller joked it was "probably the largest audience CNN had ever had".

Some 1.3 million of us dutifully tuned into the BBC, its best ever US election audience, compared with 300,000 viewers for ITV. Yet the corporation's lacklustre and painfully cautious results coverage failed to capture the excitement of a historic night because of the BBC's decision to try to kill both the US and UK audiences with one stone. The result was a panel of mostly old, grey pundits, some valiant padding between results and Jeremy Vine turning his back on viewers to fiddle with a stroppy touchscreen. Even Fox News did better, calling more wins first than any other broadcaster - 16 according to PoliticsHome. Three blogs - the Unapologetic Mexican, Pandagon and Blue Indiana - all correctly predicted 19 out of 20 results for the key battle states, and FiveThirtyEight built a solid following of readers of its comprehensive election stats. Nielsen reports that WashingtonPost.com, which has a tradition of multimedia journalism, saw the biggest percentage increase in users, up 113% to 2.31 million on November 4. Web TV viewing was up threefold in the UK overnight. Nearly 5.5 million Facebookers told friends they had voted through a widget on the site. And Twitter, awash with reaction and news, not only stayed up all night but saw a 46% increase in typical traffic and a 40% growth spurt in new accounts. Twitter updates even made it on to Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart's superb results night show: Indecision 2008.

Obama's campaign accounted for half of all online political advertising this year at $8m - a fact that won't have escaped Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt, who is reportedly on the shortlist for a chief techie role in Obama's administration.

The web has helped to inspire and empower a generation that has rejected political apathy. Obama's team used technology to make issues personal and relevant by giving people ownership of the campaign. It wasn't a complicated strategy.

It felt like Christmas morning, that euphoria of waking up to Obama's victory speech in Grant Park. We know it can't be Christmas every day, and I can't say I'm surprised that there's already a Facebook group calling for his impeachment. But the administration has already turned the campaign slogan into his new domain - change.gov. Can we keep on making history with him? Yes - I do believe we can.