The third annual Personal Democracy Forum took place May 15, 2006 and featured leaders from all segments of the political, business, technology and blogosphere arenas. This is where the latest cutting-edge developments in political technology hits the ground. Be sure to listen to our series of conference podcasts.

If you wanted to learn how to optimize the use of technology in your campaigns; how to master the new media system of blogs, podcasting, mobile phones and online video; and how to raise money, move messages and impact voting more effectively, PDF 2006 was the place to be.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was the keynote speaker, and we focused on four emerging trends:

• The maturing of blogs as powerbrokers and media-makers.
• Promising new experiments in tuning social networking tools for political communities.
• New tools for political communication, including podcasting, videoblogging, mobile phones and word-of-mouth.
• Why increasing traffic to your own website is not enough; taking advantage of the Internet as a platform.

We also featured an intensive set of workshops where a cross-spectrum of expert practitioners explained how to optimize online list-building and fundraising, how to best spend scarce online advertising dollars, how to make bloggers your allies, and what kinds of tools campaigns need and want.