Barack Obama has been receptive to ideas and influences from those outside the campaign. About 75,000 people at a rally in Oregon on May 18.

By NOAM COHEN

Barack Obama is the victor, and the Internet is taking the bows.
Commenting on the Democratic presidential primary campaign, the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan praised Mr. Obama’s success in mastering “Facebook politics. The Atlantic Monthly, in a much discussed article titled “HisSpace,’’ described what Mr. Obama’s impressive online fund-raising apparatus owes to the enhanced social networking of sites like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.
Mr. Obama is hardly alone in making use of the Web . What sets him apart is his openness to contributions from those working outside the campaign organization. As he recently described it to a Time magazine reporter, “We just had some incredibly creative young people who got involved and what I think we did well was give them a lot of latitude to experiment and try new things and to put some serious resources into it.
Consider the video “Yes We Can, Mr. Obama’s words set to music by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, which has been viewed more than 18 million times online, first at YouTube, and now at the Obama campaign’s portal, my.barackobama. com. And there is also the ubiquitous poster of Mr. Obama inspired by the famous photograph of Che Guevara created by the street artist Shepard Fairey and later incorporated into the campaign .
The receptiveness of the Obama campaign to such bottom-up influences raises a question: might the candidate actually model his approach to politics on the informal communal spirit the Internet encourages?
As Garry Wills recently suggested in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Obama’s characterization of himself as an “imperfect candidate draws on Lincoln’s idea “that the preamble’s call for ‘a more perfect union’ initiated a project, to make the Constitution a means for its own transcendence.
But at the same time, Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer - the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign - “openness and transparency and participation - were ones he said “merged perfectly with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.
Wikipedia is the influential online encyclopedia that is in a constant state of revision, thanks to its tens of thousands of contributors around the world. There is no single “editor, no presiding panel of experts for its 2.4 million articles in English. Anyone can pick up an article and make changes immediately (“wiki-wiki is Hawaiian for fast).
Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen, Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.
Aided by an army of small donors, Mr. Obama created a history-making fundraising machine, often averaging more than $1 million a day online earlier in the year. Mr. McCain’s Internet fund-raising has been negligible.
There are thousands of people working across the Internet to build enthusiasm for the Obama campaign, some of it even gently mocking, like Barackobamaisyournewbicycle. com .
For his part, Mr. Obama is quick to take himself out of the narrative, even as he promises to remake Washington. It reflects the utopian, community-building vision central to the Internet. In this scheme, Mr. Obama’s role is less leader than facilitator, a conduit for decentralized collaboration .
Some online activists are skeptical about the openness to outsiders. “The Obama campaign is still very much a top-bottom operation, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of the influential DailyKos Web site, wrote in an e-mail message.
“They’ve made it very easy for people to hop on the bandwagon, but those in the back of that wagon still get no say in where the campaign is going.
For a candidate, there is always the danger of “making yourself vulnerable by “giving participants control of chunks of the enterprise, Mr. Benkler said. Mr. Obama has to walk a careful line. It’s one thing to help popularize a campaign, quite another to shape policy.