Anyone with an interest in the political potential of blogs will want to keep abreast of developments in the USA. While it's possible that blogs may emerge here as a nascent political force during the election campaign later this year, the "netroots" are a significant presence in American politics. We are light years behind the US and what little political blogging exists here is of the top-down content generation model. Irish bloggers are for the most part offering alternative punditry to that found in the mainstream media and we would like to think that the public sphere benefits from the more raucous forms of political argument, especially when it challenges conventional wisdom.
During the last week Chris Bowers of MyDD has posted three fascinating articles that ought to be read by anyone interested in the political blogging phenomenon. The first addresses the question of the professionalisation of the netroots, especially in the context of netroots activists being hired to work for prominent Democrats like Edwards and Obama. Another post looks at the shift away from the prominence of solo bloggers to a bottom-up audience generated model. The third post deals with the structure of the new progressive blogosphere elite, and consider how difficult it is for a new blog to break into this group.
I suspect that once the election is over, Irish political bloggers will want to consider what to do next. We all hope that bloggers will register some kind of impact on the next election. After that some of us may well be ready to go beyond punditry and start some kind of netroots movement of our own. That's why it's interesting to look at what progressives in the US are doing. We won't have to re-invent the wheel and we might even have some kind of "late mover advantage"!
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