Society

Mayor/Governor Moonbeam (Jerry Brown) has started a blog.  The Christian Science Monitor examines what this means. (Thanks to Jim Horton for pointing out this story.)

Matt Cronin, a partner at online marketing firm WebLiquid, emailed an intriguing analysis of the recent Gallup survey on blog audience: Blogs are indeed quickly becoming mainstream but only to the extent that they’ll complement the news picture for those who are interested, simply due to the natural topic/opinion/agenda fragmentation of the blogoshere. While these…

Washington Post: The Federal Election Commission revealed yesterday that it plans to take what one of its commissioners termed a "relatively nonintrusive" approach to regulating political campaigns on the Internet.

The John Edwards podcast attempts to strike a folksy, casual tone.  The former VP candidate talks about the NCAA tournament being on in the background while he records with wife Elizabeth. But what really struck me in listening was that Mrs. Edwards plays a much more significant role in the podcast than one might imagine. …

Interesting commentary over at Personal Democracy Forum over the merits of advertising on blogs vs. WashingtonPost.com.  Henry Copeland of BlogAds suggested in a debate at the Online Politics conference earlier this month that you’d hit more eyeballs with a buy on political blogs than on the Post web site. Kate Kaye astutely points out that…

MeetUp.com came to fame because of the Howard Dean campaign.  Despite inroads by conservative groups like Townhall.com which has registered 24,000+ activists through the site, most of the top 15 political groups listed on the site are left-leaning.  In fact, only 3 right of center groups appear on that list.  MeetUp suffers from the public…

Blogs may be going mainstream — CNN has officially added a daily 4 minute blog segment to its "Inside Politics" show, according to USA Today highlighted by Steve Rubel.  At some point blogs may no longer be the mavericks that they once were.  How will this affect their impact?  Bloggers today proud themselves on being…

Henry Copeland of BlogAds, an advertising network for blogs, spoke to the current state of the market for ad spending in the blogosphere: After dropping 40-50% for the first couple of months after the election, it looks like we’ll be at new highs in March and April. I won’t call it a tipping point, because…

Brookings will be offering a talk on "The Impact of the New Media" tomorrow, which will be available via webcast.  Old and new media will be on hand to discuss the meaning of blogs and the like.

The Washington Post reports that new rules on internet campaigning are likely. "We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part," said FEC Commissioner David M. Mason, a Republican. "That shift has huge significance…