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I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

Shell Oil has notified its U.S. employees that an IT contractor used the personal data of four Shell workers to file fake unemployment claims in Texas.

Remember Nicholas Ciarelli, the precocious tween who started a successful Apple rumor blog, only to have it shuttered by the company's legal team? He's now posting on the DailyBeast, and he's got some interesting things to say about his favorite plaintiff: namely that since the negative PR resulting from Ciarelli's case, Apple seems to have realized the buzz-building value of early leaks and non-response to rumors. Nicholas might still be pretty young, but he's also still right. It's definitely worth a read. [DailyBeast]