Marcia Stepanek, writes in the October 26, 2000, edition of "BusinessWeek" about some of the software tools being deployed during this campaign season that are opening up the voting process -- not to increase voter turnout, but to find out more information about voters. Internet marketers and candidates, through the use of data-mining tools, are combining individual voter records and personal commercial data to target candidates, issues, and products to specific segments of the population, potentially crossing the boundaries of individual privacy in the process.

While electronic mail is still recognized by US nonprofits as a primary means of communicating with elected officials at the national level, e-mail campaigns and online petitions, however, are generally regarded with a high degree of suspicion, skepticism, or indifference by elected officials. Even the general public expresses hesitancy with this form of advocacy.

Admit it: you probably have accumulated an impressive collection of websites and pages that you have collected in your browser—yet have no idea when you added them or possibly even why. You would like to eventually share them with others, but they are not organized in a manner that makes their distribution easy.