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Less than 10 hours later, his staff countered with a video reiterating Romney's current positions. But the damage had been done, and it reverberated from then on. Type "Romney" and "flip flop" into the search engine on YouTube and some 180 videos pop up.

Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, says it's one thing for a voter to read about Romney's earlier views on abortion in a newspaper article or watch a 30-second sound bite on the evening news. It's quite another to watch a video of a younger Romney, in a five-minute video titled "The Real Romney?," state, "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country."

To Joe Trippi, who pioneered Howard Dean's insurgent online campaign in 2003, this is "the beauty and also the curse of the Web. . . . Like it or not, an army of people are working for you or against you." A veteran of past presidential campaigns -- he worked for Sen. Edward Kennedy, former vice president Walter Mondale and former congressman Richard Gephardt -- Trippi says the hardest thing for him to learn was to cede control.

This is a tension within every campaign, says Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident, a bipartisan group blog that tracks how candidates are campaigning online. Though Sifry has been impressed with Obama's Web strategy -- "again and again, we've seen how well they've married online enthusiasm with on-the-ground mobilization," he says -- Sifry asserts that Obama's Internet team erred early on. Last spring, it sought control of a MySpace page that carried Obama's name but was independently created by an Obama supporter. "The campaign should have let the supporter control his page," Sifry says.

That lapse, however, is nothing compared with the wariness that many Republican candidates have about the Web.

Michael Turk, who led President Bush's online strategy in 2004 and recently worked as a consultant for Fred Thompson, says many Republicans still think of the Web as "an expensive brochure, like a slick direct mail." McCain's site, for instance, "is definitely an extension of the broadcast, send-receive model," he says. "The overwhelming majority of space on his home page is all about McCain, and not about how real people can get involved." But the candidate's campaign has made some improvements. "They've opened up comments on the site," Turk observes.

Another example concerned the YouTube debate. After the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate last year in which the public, including a talking snowman concerned about global warming, uploaded questions to CNN producers, most of the GOP contenders were slow to accept the invitation for their turn. "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman," Romney told the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader. Pressured by young, Web-savvy conservatives who said the YouTube snub was a mistake (and who created the site SavetheDebate.com), all the candidates eventually agreed to the format.

Mindy Finn, another veteran of the Bush campaign, worked for Turk four years ago and headed Romney's online strategy until he dropped out in February.

"For campaigns, losing control also means letting candidates show more of their real personalities. A candidate is not going to be 'on' all the time, unless he or she is a really good actor. A candidate has to be himself or herself," Finn says. "In this new online era, everyone's watching, and if you're not being yourself, chances are you'll slip. And someone, somewhere, will blog about it, or upload it on YouTube."

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Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a chronicler of presidential races for more than 40 years, says the Internet "has the capacity to immerse people in the everyday minutiae of a campaign like no other medium before it." The problem with TV news, especially on cable, is that it distributes a message that many in the audience don't want to get, Jamieson says. Online, where we choose to sign up for a campaign's e-mail list, we're more inclined not only to read the e-mails we receive but also forward them to friends and relatives. Same goes for YouTube. A viewer makes a conscious decision to click on a video, says Jamieson, who points out a recent disconnect between what pundits are talking about in the 24-hour cable news cycle and what people are watching online.

After Obama's speech on race, cable news anchors repeatedly replayed sound bites from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, which were uploaded on YouTube and linked on countless blogs. Videos of Obama's 37-minute speech, however, surpassed those clips in views. So far, Obama's speech has been viewed more than 4 million times, making it the most viewed video uploaded by a presidential candidate yet on the site.