by Leora Falk

In Saturday's paper, I wrote about candidates who were looking for ways to use cellphones in their campaigns. I didn’t have room to write about the people who are getting really excited about the possibility of using cellphones to push for political change. They are inspired by a whole slew of muses, but the two that kept coming up again and again were events in China and the Philippines respectively.

Last month, protestors of a chemical plant in Xiamen, China passed around their objections via text message reaching almost all the residents of Xiamen. Construction for the plant was halted.

And two years back, a tape recording which allegedly captured the voice of Philippines president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo asking about doctoring the elections, was banned from the airwaves but circulated rapidly as a ring tone.

It was this latter example that Katrin Verclas cited when she talked with enthusiasm about the power that ring tones and cellphones can have in politics.

Verclas is the executive director of a group that helps non-profits use technology, Non Profit Technology Network that runs, among other things, MobileActive an organization devoted to using cellphones for civic engagement.

“The trick is to make them clever enough so that they become a talking point as opposed to sort of a blunt instrument of political persuasion,” she told me over the phone after laughing because her own cellphone plays the “I Got A Crush on Obama” song when it rings. She cited incidents in Zimbabwe where “dangerous political jokes” were passed around via text messaging. But in a country where political expression is not limited? She said that then, it’s a little harder to make cellphones catch on. “I think the age of the ring tone isn’t’ here yet. It’s not the Philippines, where the ring tone that has made headline news.” Still she said she hopes “the ring tone will be the bumper sticker of the ‘08 campaign.”

But Verclas, who just launched the Web site Ringtones08.com for people to make their own political ring tones, is not the only one excited by the possibilities.

Ariel Poler runs the company Text Marks, which allows people to set up groups to receive mass text messages. More recently, he started Reactee, which allows users to make T-shirts encouraging everyone who sees you wearing them to text a key word to txtmark’s number to subscribe to a text messaging service. Poler estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the T-shirts were political.

The Reactee Web site has a model wearing a T-shirt that read “Obama for President—text OBAMA to 41411 to help.”

When I sent a text asking for whoever owned the key word to call me back, I got three calls one from Poler, telling me he ran the keyword as a way to show how his service could be used for campaigning and that he chose Obama because he wanted “someone…that would not be too controversial,” one from the Obama campaign, who Poler says is not affiliated but might have signed up to receive the messages, and one from Daniel Pifko, who runs his own silicone valley start up that advises politicians about how to use cellphones to their advantage, Phone Democracy.

“The election arena is underserved in the mobile space,” Pifko said over his cellphone while his son vied for attention in the background. “People kind of jump to the assumption that technology is only for use by the people.” But Pifko was looking to get involved in political campaigns and get that technology used by those vying for the votes of “the people.”

Fun fact: neither Verclas nor Pifko are American citizens, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to get others to pick up their cellphones, download a ring tone, send a text message and go out and vote.