When it comes to adapting information technology, Washington is always about two years behind the rest of the country. So it makes sense that, finally, Web 2.0 is catching hold and gathering momentum here, in early 2007.

Washington’s political operative and consulting class has been energized by the early start to the 2008 election. And no one is ignoring the Web this campaign cycle. Call it Politics 2.0, and watch how it changes the media power balance when it comes to political discourse.

Consider YouTube’s YouChoose ’08, which last month launched its online channels for presidential candidates – and has 13 of them in a fortnight. Yahoo’s presidential election site is attempting to build community around Flickr photo-shoots of candidates on the stump. MySpace is likely to start a presidential space of its own.

Sure, every major candidate has paid lip service to glories of the Internet since 1996. Bill Clinton invoked the “information super-highway” and connecting classrooms to the Internet. Bob Dole clumsily mangled his campaign’s Web address during a presidential debate.

That was all window-dressing. Their teams – and their successors’ teams’ in 2000 and 2004 – mostly hired a few geeks to play politics on computers. The real campaigning went on in the broadcast television networks and in the pages of The New York Times and Washington Post.

That’s about to change. There is an energy about electoral politics and the Internet that is different this time around. Almost all of it has to do with maturation of software and social networking models that could upset the pre-ordained dance between candidates, media and voters. Already, we’ve seen John Edwards make YouTube a big part of his campaign, with others close behind.

To put it in other words, can Web 2.0 in 2008 truly displace the “MSM” as the premier medium of political discourse? Can the blogosphere bring down the mass-market media stage?

It could. Or at least it might. So says Joe Trippi, former campaign manager to Howard Dean. Sure, Dean lost. But Chuck DeFeo, who was eCampaign Manager for Bush-Cheney ’04, agrees completely with Trippi’s analysis. Now he’s trying to harness conservative backlashers – the people who do “not believe that Dan Rather was reflecting” their views – to congregate at Salem Communications’ Townhall.com.

Trippi and DeFeo were only two of the geek-politicos that gathered last week for Politics Online, the annual conference of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. Optimism about the Politics 2.0 was high.

Even NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who predicted that candidates would use Web 2.0 technologies as a “symbolic gesture” but “keep things exactly the same,” was bullish on blogs and wikis. They would do for citizen journalism what his previous calling – promoting “public journalism” in an (unsuccessful) effort to get the press to focus on election issues, and not the horse race – could never do.

Also represented at the conference were the creators of innovative sites like TechPresident and PresVid.com, or “the YouTube Campaign.” Online strategies herald new voter engagement that will “make politicians more accountable, creating a virtuous circle where elected officials who are… less top-down are rewarded with greater voter trust and support,” wrote TechPresident creators Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry.

But if Politics 2.0 benefits smart politicians and engaged voters, who loses from this new turn of affairs? The mainstream media!

Indeed, the most entertaining part of Politics Online came from a panel that pitted bloggers versus MSM: Rosen and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com and PresVid against Jim Brady, executive editor of the washingtonpost.com, and David Plotz, deputy editor of Slate (now owned by the Washington Post).

Plotz said that Web traffic shows that horse race is what readers want – and don’t “want to eat their vegetables.”

“Journalists are convinced that no one wants ‘issues’ stories,” countered Rosen. “I don’t think that is going to change. The wild card is all the people excluded by the earlier process and all the things they can bring.”

If there’s a king-maker in Politics 2.0, it won’t be the likes of The New York Times or the CBS evening news.

By there may still be an opening. Consider an off-handed comment at the conference by Eliott Schrage, vice president of global communications for Google: “We have reached out to all the candidates and invited them to come to Google, to talk technology and policy, and maybe even grab lunch. And we are going to put those videos up if we can, and if the candidates permit us, on our web sites as well.”

Is it possible that the most consequential media pilgrimage a candidate makes in the 2008 election will be to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, rather than to the mid-town Manhattan news rooms of The Times or the CBS Evening News?

We’ve been writing this column for only a year, but lo and behold, it’s time again for our annual summer reading special. Since the temptation is to unplug, we thought this was as good a time as any to share some of our favorite carbon-based information tools (i.e., books) that you might want to take with you to the beach or the countryside. Here, our favorite poli-tech books of the past year:

If you have time for only one book, our top recommendation goes to Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” At the Personal Democracy Forum, Shirky jokingly told the audience that his book could be summarized as, “Group organizing just got a lot easier. … And I just saved you $25.” That’s true, but if you want a stunning and easy-to-read guide to how the Internet is fostering a societal change as big as those spurred by the invention of the printing press and movable type, “Here Comes Everybody” is for you. Shirky has a sharp eye for examples, and his discussion of how new group-forming behavior is becoming a mass phenomenon will change how you think about the future of politics.

The next book we would add to your pile is Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.” If Shirky’s main focus is how the Net is fostering a creative explosion of self-organization, Zittrain’s goal is to warn that this very openness could also be the Net’s undoing. Thanks to the inclusive nature of personal computers that will run any software you load onto them, and to open protocols for Web development, we’re living in a golden age of what Zittrain calls “generativity.” But we can’t take it for granted, as spam, malware and other malevolent entitites online are pushing people toward shiny, closed appliances such as the iPhone; the owners of the Net’s pipes, the telcos, want to start discriminating among content online and end the practice of Net neutrality. Whatever your political leaning, if you’re a tech-politico, Zittrain’s book makes for sober reading.

There has been a bumper crop of recent books on the more prosaic side of Net politics, starting last year with Matt Bai’s “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics” and Garrett Graff’s “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House.” Both books hold up pretty well in terms of analyzing the broad contours of the forces affecting the 2008 presidential contest, even though they were written well before Barack Obama’s insurgent, Internet-powered campaign took off.

If you’re interested in the sociological side of politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais predict a generational tidal wave for Obama in November. Their book, “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics,” makes a cogent case that we are on the cusp of a “civic generation” and that this demographic and cultural tide will favor progressive Democrats who offer a new way of solving society’s problems. One of those young activists, Michael Connery, makes the same case in his compelling call to arms, “Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority.” Maybe, but perhaps John McCain’s lifetime of public service will resonate with these voters, as well. (But that book has yet to be written.)

If your taste in political reading is more down in the trenches, where campaigns are actually fought and won, two books are worth your attention. The first, “Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics,” was edited by Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter, two veterans of that seminal 2004 effort. It features first-person essays from nearly all of the key players on the Dean campaign, and it is a must for anyone who wants to understand the nuts and bolts of merging a classic long-shot bid with the heady madness of the nation’s first Internet-powered presidential candidacy.

The second is called “Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics,” by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox. Drawing on their own experiences in 2004 (with Dean and the Draft Wesley Clark movement) and the 2006 rise of Jim Webb, the authors update the story told by Teachout et al. Its core is a firsthand description of the Virginia Senate race, where Feld was Webb’s director of online fundraising, but the authors use that microcosm to make larger arguments about how politics is being upended by a combination of grass-roots activism and do-it-yourself technology.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t suggest our own book, “Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age,” which we edited with our colleagues Allison Fine and Joshua Levy. We asked contributors: What if our country’s Founders had all of today’s technology and tools for communication? How would they change the ways things work? The resulting ideas, from people such as Newt Gingrich, Craig Newmark, Glenn Reynolds, Joe Trippi, Jeff Jarvis, Esther Dyson and Beth Noveck, will surprise you. You can download the book free as a PDF at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com or join in the conversation about the essays by adding a comment.

Or you can take it to the beach, where it will make a very nice pillow.

Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry are, respectively, the founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.