[It all started with] SmirkingChimp.com, a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for anti-Bush sentiment... [The Howard Dean campaign posted] "We want to hear from you. We want to know what you think"...

""That was an amazing day to see that rise out of nowhere. People were floored that the thread title was 'Ask the Dean Campaign'...[they] were actually asking questions and interacting. Never before had anyone seen that"...

""The reason these community sites have formed," says Gross, rattling off the names DailyKos, MyDD, Eschaton, Democratic Underground and Buzzflash, along with the SmirkingChimp, "is the Democratic Party is too based on insiders"...WorldChanging.com...

"A well-written blog, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, gets more than 500,000 monthly visitors--as many as the entire website of The American Prospect, the magazine where Marshall used to work, at a fraction of the cost...

"...almost 4.3 million blogs... more than 400,000 fresh postings every day...

"DailyKos is a multilayered community engineered to reward ideas that bubble up from below... is built on a tool called Scoop, which includes peer moderation, where members rank each other's entries and comments. Smart diary postings thus often rise to Moulitsas's attention, and if he reprints them on his main page they gain an even larger audience...

"Beyond Kos, blog-based political networking has had all kinds of concrete political effects. Best known is the way prominent bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall, along with some conservatives like Glenn Reynolds, fired up the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond story, which led to Lott's fall from grace. More recently, bloggers have spurred the resignation of a homophobic Congressman (Ed Schrock), undermined the credibility of key evidence in Dan Rather's story on Bush's National Guard service, distributed Jon Stewart's blistering October 15 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, beat back Sinclair Broadcasting's plan to force its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary, and formed a back channel for unhappy soldiers in Iraq and their families back home...

"...Speaking off-mike, he argued, was like blogging--in both cases people's real voices could be heard, which is what we hunger for. "Control kills scale. Control kills passion. Control kills the human voice," Weinberger insisted.

Loss of Control Freaks

"That message has been very slow in reaching the Democratic establishment... Nor did this message penetrate the Kerry campaign... That's because top-down politics is all about maintaining control...

""Anybody who does politics the old way will fight doing things the new way because it's harder to get paid for it... Look at every other industry and how the Internet has altered it. Take E-Trade and the selling of stocks. Or Orbitz and the travel industry. In every case, the Internet enables getting rid of the middlemen"...

"..."We have to go through a generational purge... one big question for the coming year will be the extent to which grassroots activists, small donors and bloggers decide to raise hard questions about the functioning of the party organs and interest groups that until now have been able to act on their behalf without having to pay a price for their mistakes. The Kerry debacle is a good place to start.

"Open-source politics is still a long way off. The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more participants to return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing.

"To the visionary technologists building the new civic software, we are living in nothing short of a paradigm shift... "In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the Internet will give it back"...

""I think there are still a lot of Americans who think that no one is listening to them," says Theda Skocpol. She argues that web-enabled politicking may just be "really well suited to the liberal side of the spectrum, where you have a lot of college-educated people...

"...Hispanics have closed the gap with whites, with two-thirds of both groups going online, but Internet usage among blacks lags by about 18 percent...

"...people who rely on the net for political information are actually more likely than non-net users to seek out views different from their own, according to a new Pew Internet study.

"...a much larger wave... the next generation is growing up online.... "We're seeing the first drips of what is going to be a downpour"... in most high schools in America, students are using the web to rank their teachers (Rate My Teachers.com)... Just imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives, and start rating other authority figures, like politicians and bosses" (Micah L. Sifry. "The Rise of Open-Source Politics." The Nation, Nov. 22, 2004: 14-20).