Now that Howard Dean has officially dropped out of the race (sort of), I thought I’d point out Clay Shirky’s interesting analysis (from a couple of weeks ago) of what happened from the perspective of internet-based campaign organization. Lots of interesting observations like:

The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost – the voters didn’t like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he’d win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well — we were all in Deanspace for a while there.