Archive: Year: 2005

Ronald Brownstein brings together two of my favorite worlds in his latest Outlook column for the LA Times: the Internet and third-party politics. Channeling Joe Trippi, who has been making this point for a while, he argues that when you combine the polarizing postures of the two major parties with the disintermediating power of Internet-based fundraising and organizing, you are creating the conditions for a potentially dynamic third-party or independent bid for the White House in 2008. He writes: The Internet could allow an independent candidate to more easily identify an audience and financial base, just as it has allowed blogs like the liberal Daily Kos or conservative InstaPundit to find a community of like-minded readers. More precisely, the Internet has...

Campaigns are hiring bloggers; it looks like Mathew Gross and crew have inspired a cottage industry. Tim Tagaris, who cut his teeth on Jeff Seemann's campaign last cycle, and then went to the Swing State Project blog for a couple of months, is working on Chuck Pennacchio's underdog Senate bid in Pennsylvania...

Did Cardinal Ratzinger have a blog strategy for becoming Pope? A glance at this Blogpulse chart is suggestive...

Do you think the issue of telecom regulation has no effect on your life? David Isenberg, the ebullient and cherubic force behind this year's Freedom-to-Connect conference taking place today and tomorrow in Silver Spring, MD, just opened the event with this startling vision: The people of the world just got an "Internet dividend" of $1 trillion (that's $1,000,000,000,000) a year, thanks to the efforts of "six guys in Europe" (i.e. the Skype VOIPers, who are blazing the path toward universal free connectivity). This is money that "we don't need to spend on telephone service any more." David asks, "What will we spend it on? Ending hunger? Buying the pharmaceutical companies?" Now I see why David started his rant by referring to unnamed...

Talk-radio host and power-blogger Hugh Hewitt gets so many things right in his new book, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, that it’s almost painful to call him on the one truly gigantic thing that he gets wrong. It doesn’t help matters that he’s a genuinely nice guy who not only signed my copy of his book with a friendly inscription, “Thanks for leading it,” he’s kindly agreed to come speak at this May’s Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York May 16. (Full disclosure: he also showers my brother David and his company Technorati with plenty of praise in the book.) But if the rise of independent citizen-driven media (a.k.a. blogging) is all about trust—as Hewitt puts...