As Barack Obama was giving his first news conference today as president elect, the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was hearing how the web was won by him in 2008.

Obama, who launched his change.gov transition website on Thursday, used the web principally to raise money and organise constituencies, said John Heilemann of New York magazine, moderator of the politics panel.

“To me, one of the most staggering statistics of the election was that, in the month of February, Barack Obama raised $70m – the most any democratic candidate had ever raised in a month – and held exactly zero fund-raisers,” he said.

Joe Trippi, who worked on John Edwards’ campaign and authored The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, said: “The future is that this is the best prospect we’ve had for public financing.”

“Obama won every single caucus state that mattered,” he continued, “And he did it because he was able to move and organise thousands of people across the states and [Hillary Clinton] did not have the money and did not use the tools. His lead came out of those caucus states. This is civic engagement on a level we’ve never seen before.”

Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, complained that politics had entered a YouTubeification phase where “everything you say is exposed.”

“I now have to watch myself singing I left my heart in San Francisco and I can’t get it to go away. This is the end of the world as we know it,” he joked.

More seriously, he warned there could be a lot of collateral damage from politics becoming a 24-7 web TV series, although Joe Trippi argued the impact would lessen over time.

Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post defended her army of 12,000 “Off the Bus” citizen journalists, which had reported off-the-cuff remarks such as Bill Clinton calling a Vanity Fair editor a “scumbag”.

Mayor Newsom raised the question of whether this full glare of web exposure would make politicians more guarded or make them seem more open:

“Are we now more authentic or less authentic, when we always have to be ‘on’ [-the-record], that’s the question,” he said.

(The photo above of Barack Obama’s unguarded moment on election night is actually from his own publicly available photostream on Flickr)

Jerry Yang, Yahoo chief executive, spoke emphatically about wanting to remain in that role, in an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Following market rumours that he was about to quit earlier in the day, he told interviewer John Battelle:

“I’m passionate about Yahoo, I’m passionate about its people, I’m passionate about the mission and I’m willing to go through walls to do it, and that’s the reason I’m there [as CEO],” he said.

Yang was also critical of the Justice department, which had just scuppered Yahoo’s search advertising deal with Google.

“I really thought that the government in this case does not understand our industry, they have a market definition that I think is too narrow and I think things like this tend to have unintended consequences for our entire industry.”

The internet company’s chief also said he had wanted to do a deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft in May, but “it was not meant to be.”

“I don’t have an ego about remaining independent. At the end of the day, we believed that there was a deal to be done, we were not that far apart, they walked away because they saw something else that they didn’t want to do.

“And we went back to them and we said even at the price [of $33 a share] you were suggesting, are you guys willing to do the deal, and they said no, so I don’t know what else we could have done.”

With Yahoo closing at $13.92 on Wednesday, maybe now the price is right for Steve Ballmer to reconsider.

(Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson)

For a company with a mountain to climb, Yahoo may have made the perfect hire.

Jeff Dossett has just been named as senior vice president, US Audience, replacing the departing Scott Moore as overseer of Yahoo’s consumer businesses.

Dossett previously led strategy and execution for Microsoft MSN’s audience, content and programming in the US as executive producer and general manager of the MSN Media Network.

More interestingly, in 2002, he took a two-year leave of absence to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. After reaching the summit of Everest in May 2004, he became the third Canadian in history to complete successfully the “Seven Summits.”

Dossett will be Sherpa Tenzing to [Sir Edmund] Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo US, in trying to lift the company from base camp in its fortunes, following the withdrawal of Microsoft’s takeover offer in May.

“I’m confident he is well-suited to lead Yahoo’s audience business to even greater heights,” said Schneider.

There is no word as yet on where Scott Moore is bound.

Yahoo shares closed slightly lower on Monday, off 0.6 per cent at $12.75, on fears that its search advertising deal with Google may not go ahead.