The most popular political weblogs have been able to support their publishers through an intermediary called Blogads. As this election season heated up, most of the top sites saw extreme traffic spikes and have been able to set lucrative- but- competitive prices for ad views (not clickthrough) on their sites.

Echoditto, one of the new Internet strategy firms that rose from the ashes of the Howard Dean campaign, has posted a handy list of "best practices and tips for online fundraising."<!--first--> The firm also has a pretty interesting blog.

Chris Bowers of MyDD and Bob Brigham of Swing State Project have combined their intellectual forces to make a very cogent point about the state of state Democratic parties and their failure to understand the potential of the "netroots." In the wake of this weekend's meeting of the Association of State Democratic Parties, Brigham discovered that 3/4 of those state parties do not have blogs. Calling this a "sign of incompetence," (after all, you can set up a rudimentary site on blogger in a matter of minutes), he writes,

While almost all of these states have a mechanism for accepting online donations, none of them decided to catapult their online campaigns by having a blog. Likewise, almost all of these websites ask people to volunteer without offering daily reasons why their time is needed.

Bowers adds:

Don't miss the intense and heartfelt discussion underway over at DailyKos between Markos Moulitsas and Zack Exley, formerly the Kerry campaign Internet director, and before that one of MoveOn's brightest organizers. It started with Kos calling Exley an "idiot" based on comments reported by noted net contrarian Andrew Orlowski. Exley's detailed response (entitled "Dear Markos and friends," a far friendlier headline) appeared on the site a few hours later. Many smart comments from people who worked in the trenches are attached to both missives. Matt Stoller has been working this vineyard too on the Blogging of the President, here and here. Many lessons to be studied and learned...And one cool note to consider: we're transfixed by a terrific debate between two guys whose average age isn't even thirty!

More on best practices for online organizing: See Tim Tagaris's article "My ATM Pin Number or Online Fundraising," over at Swingstateproject.com. Tagaris was the spokesman for Jeff Seemann's upstart congressional campaign, which Mary Lynn F. Jones covered for PDF back in October. HIs points are aimed at congressional candidates planning for 2006 who think they can tap activists' wallets without involving them in a larger movement, and while he's talking to progressives, everything he's saying applies to conservative movement types as well. I won't rehash everything he says, except to endorse his core point: "It isn't fundraising requests that breed successful netroots fundraising." It's the relationships, the involvement, the listening and the engagement.

Privacy isn't always a matter of unprotected data or unconstitutional seizures.

The A.C.L.U. is facing new scrutiny for compiling public data about its donors' affiliations. Is there a penumbra of privacy around the lives we live publically, but somewhat facelessly?

In a December article about "dating blogs," author and constitutional scholar Jeff Rosen talks about the growing need for "new social conventions to resurrect the boundaries between public and private interactions."

As technology makes the traces our actions more visible, a new category of data is emerging: the "ripples" we leave behind.

Is this information fair game? Like the stories ex-girlfriends tell about contestants on reality TV shows?

Or do we need new "quarantine"-style rules around who can collect our ripples, and what they can do with them?

Initial response from the A.C.L.U.

A lot has been written about the effectives of the Bush and Kerry Internet strategies, including details of money raised, volunteers recruited, and votes won using the Web. However, information about specific online advertising strategies has yet to be released by either side.

Addressing this concern, MSHC Partners has published details about the online ad campaigns conducted by John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee. [Full disclosure, I work at MSHC and helped direct the Kerry and DNC online ad strategies. From this point forward, I’m just going to write in the first person.]

The purpose of releasing this information is simple: to educate the political community about the effectiveness of online marketing. Continuity of key learnings has always been a challenge to all those who have worked in and around political campaigns. Campaigns shut down after elections and little is done to preserve information about the strategies that worked (and didn't work) best.

Rob Stein says "progressives should not emulate what conservatives have done." The activist, former Commerce Dept. official, venture capitalist, and ally of Simon Rosenberg, has been going around the country giving select viewings of a Powerpoint presentation entitled: "The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix." In it, he details the rise, funding and functioning of what some netroots activists nervously (or proudly, depending on their political coloration) have taken to calling the Right's "mighty wurlitzer."

Stein tells Don Hazen of Alternet.org:

Progressives have different values, this is the 21st century, the conservative infrastructure is in place and will continue to grow, and so we have to do it all differently. We must build from both the ground up and from the top down. We must be technologically sophisticated and new media, narrowcast-savvy. We must build institutions capable of great flexibility to deal with the rapid pace of change in the world. We need a new generation of leaders able to integrate the local/global complexity of the world to manage our institutions in 2010, 2020 and beyond.

Hmm. If this is true, then why doesn't Stein--whose building a group called the "Democracy Alliance"--put his Powerpoint presentation on the web, under a Creative Commons license, where everyone can chew on it, not just the "high net worth individuals" he's hobnobbing with? Or, cross-post it with SourceWatch (formerly known as Disinfopedia) to add to their impressive documentation of the whole PR and lobbying infrastructure?

Convio just unveiled a tool that automates messages to members of advocacy organizations based on their representatives' voting records. According to the press release, the software services company's "Advocacy Center" houses and tracks data on past and pending House and Senate votes including amendments that could block passage.

So, say Citizens Against Government Waste (a Convio client) wants to get the word out about all the pork padding a pending farm subsidy bill. The group can automatically customize site content or email newsletters to feature details on the fat that Joe Citizen's Congressman wants to funnel through the legislation to his favorite hometown butcher.

And I'm still waiting for my local paper to cover my Congressman's votes....

Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap."

Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues:

And the web-only kind of activism has a mixed track record at best. At first, MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest seemed like a trailblazing concept. Until you saw the God-awful ad that won, and realized that, like most MoveOn initiatives before or since, all that energy was simply being dumped into a rat hole. Just how credible and useful are online polls when your guy wins with 90% of the vote? And using a chat room or posting a comment on a blog is not in itself a productive political act; for one thing, you could be out talking to undecideds instead of preaching to the online choir, and secondly, in the blogosphere, quality matters more than quantity. A thousand blogs echoing the WaPo/NYT line will never be as effective as fifty blogs providing an interesting and original alternative voice, probing for weaknesses in the MSM Death Star.

My two cents: Like most debates about the relative merits of different political strategies, this one is colored indelibly by the fact that the Republicans won. GOP e-activists are also doing a good job of presenting themselves as the most net-savvy, most concerned with pushing power to the edges of their network, etc.