A recent New York Times article on the DailyKos convention in Las Vegas mentions in passing a trend that I think is going to be huge in the 2006 and 2008 campaign cycles: user generated campaign videos. The article tells the story of Ava Lowery, a 15 year old from rural Alabama whose video condemnation of the Bush administration was shown at the Daily Kos convention and has been viewed 40,000 times so far on YouTube.

Free video hosting and discovery sites like Google Video and Youtube simply didn’t exist yet in 2004. If you wanted to post a video online back then, you were probably going to have to pay. Plus, even if you did post a video chances are no one would find it since there weren’t centralized video directories people could search (YouTube and Google Video once again). Combine these factors with the plummeting price of digital video cameras and growing adoption of broadband, and you’ve got a boom in online video.

As people begin to focus on the 2006 election, I’d look for tons more videos like the one produced by Lowery. And I’ll bet one or two of them will be seen enough that they might actually have an impact on a race or two.