(Just posted this over on TechPresident, and I thought it was kinda interesting -- or, at least, interesting enough to justify crossposting it here. Speaking of Lost, did Kate call the baby "Aaron" or "Eric"? I swear I heard Eric.)

Trolling the Internets today in an attempt to make some sense of last night's perplexing Lost episode, I came across an idea that made me think, naturally, of a new way of understanding the tremendous amount of voter-generated content swirling around the presidential campaigns right now.

The idea came from an interview with two of the show's producers. They were quizzed about whether or not it's safe for Lost fans to draw conclusions about the show's core narrative from all of the related videos and games and other supra-show stuff available online. In response, they drew a distinction between what's "in canon," as they put it, and what's not. The mobisodes, short video clips distributed mainly via cell phone, are in canon. The Orchid video, a teaser film revealed at Comic-Con 2007, is too. But Find 815, an sort of online gaming experience, is not. (One potentially interesting side note -- the producers' ideas on what is and isn't canonical differs from those detailed on the community-created Lostpedia wiki.)

Now, there's an obvious difference between the giant pile of Lost-related content and the tremendous amount of content we're seeing generated around the presidential campaigns -- particularly on the Democratic side and most notably by the supporters of Barack Obama. In the show's case, a good deal of that content is created by people working at or for HQ (aka NBC).

But there's something interesting happening on the political front where campaigns are making decisions on what's "in canon" and what's not. And so we end up seeing MySpace profiles cultivated by supporters co-opted by a campaign and videos created by a Black Eyed Pea featured as the centerpiece of a candidate's official email.

I can't say that I have any particular insights on this front yet. But it seems to me to be an interesting way to think about a world where the distinction between "official" and "unofficial" campaign materials doesn't seem to cut it anymore. Maybe we should start exploring the idea that user-generated content can be kinda official, "in canon" or not?