During the days leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, I’m thinking more and more about social media and how we can get delegates to make the most effective use of it.

I have set up the DemConvention room on FriendFeed. I have gotten some people to sign up on Twitter and Utterz and to start sharing their various social media addresses. However, things keep changing quickly.

On Thursday, there was SocialMediaCampNYC. I didn’t make it into the city for that. However, on Saturday, there was a SocialMediaBBQ in Stonington, CT that I attended. I saw some old friends there, friends that I only knew online as well as meeting some new friends. Fiona came along and talked with people about her radio show.

Back home now, I’m checking out some of the sites that people have suggested to me over the past few weeks. As an example, Gcast provides another site for people to call into to leave messages that become podcasts. Upside? It has a toll free number to call. Downside, it takes a few more steps to actually start recording, which isn’t great if you’re in a rush. It doesn’t seem to integrate text, pictures, or video. Most significantly, it doesn’t seem to have much of a community. I’ll check back again some other day to see if it has become any more interesting.

Rejaw is the microblog du jour. Good points? It supports OpenId and replies. I believe it is supposed to take URLs of pictures and embed them into the stream, or something like that. So far, only I’ve only been able to find a few of the earliest adopters. I’ve heard that they are supposed to have something nice for the Mac. I haven’t tried it and from the web, it just isn’t all that exciting.

Posterous is an interesting new site. It is set up for people that want to send posts via email. As a matter of fact, that is how you initially sign up, by sending an email which becomes your first post. You can set it up to forward posts on to Blogger, Wordpress, Xanga, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Livejournal, and other sites. I couldn’t get it to feed by Drupal site, but it feeds the others nicely.

If you send an email in HTML format from Outlook it doesn’t handle it nicely. However, if you send a plain text email, with HTML in the plain text, it processes that nicely. I’m not sure when I’d use Posterous as opposed to other tools, but it seems nice, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Via Twine, I heard that Second Brain has added new features, particularly around the services that it supports. Second Brain does have a nice tag cloud, but again the community doesn’t seem large or active enough to draw me in. It is worth keeping an eye on, but not interesting enough to draw me back daily.

Also, during the week, I had a good discussion with the folks from Mixed Ink. The have a collaborative writing tool, sort of like a cross between a wiki and dig. It was used by Netroots Nation to work on a proposed draft of the Democratic Platform. They haven’t started beta testing yet, but it will be fun to explore them when they do. It seems like there competition may come from Kluster.

Kluster is providing free access for people that want to test drive it, but if you want to have multiple projects, dedicated subdomains and other perks, you need to buy a package, the cheapest of which is currently $27/month. On first pass, it looks a little complicated to set up, so I’ll probably wait for a while before I play with it extensively.

There are still a bunch of other sites on my list to explore, but they will have to wait a bit longer.