Politics Courts (Once More With Feeling) the Blog
The influence of the blogosphere and online sites in politics, which was writ large in the last presidential election, will come as no surprise in the upcoming one.
The influential site in the New Hampshire primary only gets about 800 readers a day, but second-tier candidates in the race are paying a lot of attention to it.
The reason? They seek to influence any possible influencer, even those who never would have gotten on the bus in campaigns past.
While much has been written about the impact of the online space on politics, aside from an interesting way of fund raising, the last election was not swayed by the Web in the kind of significant way that seems inevitable, even though a vast trove of political information moved online, a spate of influential political bloggers grew prominent and pols used the Internet for organizing purposes.
It will be interesting, though, what the rise of social networks–which has only happened in the last two years in a major shift–will mean to the mix going forward.
As people become more and more comfortable with high degrees of interactivity and the social graphs being created by Facebook and MySpace (which is doing a ton of political programming) become more integral, one wonders if politics–which is still largely a time-and-place analog experience–will shift too, well beyond Barack Obama’s MySpace page.
