I'm sitting in an event for the Texas candidates here at Netroots Nation, and two great legislative candidates are sitting on the panel:

Joe Jaworski is a running for the 11th Senate District. He previously served as a member of the Galveston City Council, where he was mayor pro-tem in his last term. On Tuesday, he announced that he had raised more than $801,000 from 1,267 individual contributors so far in this campaign. Jaworski's campaign reports district has the highest Democratic performance of any Republican-held district in the state.

Sherrie Matula is running for House District 129. She is an educator and community activist who ran a very strong campaign for the same seat in 2006. On Wednesday, she announced that she had raised nearly $127,000, leaving her with more cash on hand than her GOP opponent, who is the incumbent. Her campaign is also running a very successful field operation -- she has knocked on more than 2,000 doors since June 1.

My Left Nutmeg -- a terrific blog for all things Connecticut -- reviewed DLCCWeb this week:

For many campaigns, technical knowledge and the cost of Web design consultants are barriers.

Now that other national committee, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) has stepped into the void with DLCCWeb, a service aimed at making it easy and cheap for state legislative candidates to have a professional-looking and powerful online presence. For $40 per month and no start up fees, any Democratic candidate can get:

• Web site hosting, including a content editor (no HTML knowledge required), use of prebuilt templates or customized designs, and a blog feature;
• An online database that enables campaigns to import or export lists of supporters;
• Unlimited e-mail blasts to supporters, with the ability to segment and target the list;
• Three e-mail accounts; and
• An event registration tool.

While I'm not necessarily endorsing this over other services, it is a good example of a party committee stepping up to help establish an important and inexpensive infrastructural tool for a huge number of candidates.

Connecticut is in fact one of the states where candidates are using this service to power their campaigns online. I can think of two pretty good examples:

Rep. Deb Heinrich is using DLCCWeb to run for reelection. Through her website, she is posting her news clips, organizing events, and asking for volunteers.

George Colli is running for state senate. He is writing a blog, sharing his endorsements, and distributing his press releases. Collli is also using his website to connect supporters to social networking like Facebook and YouTube.

If you see other mentions of DLCCWeb online, shoot me a line or post a comment. I really appreciate the feedback (even if it's suggestions for how to improve the service).