Nice write-up on the Vermont grassroots effort for Obama from Dan Barlow. For some reason, I liked this part the best…

Obama may have Neil Jensen of Monkton to thank for his win here Tuesday night. Jensen, a web designer, began talking to friends about the Illinois senator in the fall of 2006 — long before he was even a declared candidate.

A meet-up of Obama supporters at a restaurant in Burlington in December 2006 attracted about 30 people, Jensen said. Soon, the monthly meetings began drawing more and more interested Vermonters — a base that the campaign easily tapped into when it began its groundwork this year in the state.

“Our goal at first was to help out in New Hampshire,” Jensen said. “But once it became clear that Vermont might actually be important in this, we shifted focus.”

Thankfully, Obama’s campaign did not take a top-down approach to generating support in Vermont, he added, and instead facilitated the efforts and outreach brainstormed by supporters on the grass-roots-level, Jensen said. Now, many of the Vermont Obama supporters will be using call-bank technology on the candidate’s Web site to reach out to voters in the next primary states.

“The results were actually exactly what I expected,” he said. “The early polls and the support we saw made it clear that Vermont would support Obama. But we never took it for granted.”

Read the whole thing.

And there’s also a fantastic cover article in the new Rolling Stone that discusses the Obama campaign’s advances in using the Web as an organizing tool…

It’s Presidents day, two weeks before the Texas primary, and Adam Ukman has come to the small city of San Marcos to train precinct captains for Barack Obama. A soft-spoken native of Houston, Ukman has served on the campaign’s front lines in Iowa and Utah, organizing grass-roots supporters to secure decisive victories in both states. This evening, more than eighty residents of San Marcos have crammed into a yellow clapboard recreation center on a street dotted with shacks that date from the Jim Crow era. “Our job is not to run in here to tell you how it’s going to be,” Ukman tells them. “This is your campaign. Not our campaign.”