Road Trip! Young Republicans Blog and Twitter Their Way Across the U.S., Wired.

The Republican road trip - organized by the College Republican National Committee -- is meant to energize McCain's younger supporters. All four of the traveling quartet are blogging, and one of them, Chris Caraballo, a 24-year-old film student at the University of Southern California, is shooting video. Joining Caraballo and Jackson on the road are Kerry Donnelly, a 21-year-old Fordham University graduate, and Jeremy Harrell, 22, a University of Miami at Ohio graduate.

"One reason we're using the technology that we're using now is to draw attention to the fact that there are new, interesting, relevant, and extremely efficient ways to get information to people," says Jackson, who just graduated from Clemson University. "That's why we're keeping track of our trip ... through our blog and other Web 2.0 tools."

Rebranding via Blogging, Know It All.

CIOI: Where do you want this to go?

Henke: We all approach it differently, each of us comes from a different perspective, a different part of the coalition of the Right. I belong to the libertarian, the leave-us-alone coalition, a group that does not feel that the party is representing it or telling its story. The right side of the blogosphere is dominated by libertarians - and I don't mean that with a capital L, but the limited government, leave-me-alone libertarians. That represents where the future of the Republican Party could lie. The infrastructure could be built on line, if the Party can recognize and take advantage of that environment

CIOI: You guys are playing catch-up. How did liberals take the lead online?

Henke: The web is conducive to insurgency movements. That's been the Democrats for the last eight years. They were out of power and needed different tools. Progressives perceived that the political culture had shifted, but the Democratic Party did not shift with it, so they began telling a story about a different vision of the Democratic Party and the political system. They made fundamental criticisms of both parties and the media, and rallied a lot of people to them. They erected a very effective mechanism for bringing the party in their direction, they created a gravitational pull so the political leaders and the money people had to come to them. That has fundamentally reshaped the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, on the other hand, was perceived by most in its base as being a more effective machine.

SHEFFIELD: Online, conservatives miss bigger point, Washington Times.

While more conservatism does not necessarily equal victory, it is also true that better technology does not, either. Superior technology never saved a bad candidate, as Presidents Howard Dean and Ron Paul can attest. Observing their losses, however, many on the right have drawn the wrong conclusion, thinking that the failure of either candidate to acquire the traction they needed was because engaging the Internet is not useful (beyond raising money) or that it only appeals to young people who don't vote.

That last point is one particular myth that just won't die.

Contrary to popular misconception, people who read political blogs tend to be middle-aged. This ought to be self-evident, given that younger people generally are not interested in politics, and older people are less likely to be on the Web. It's long past time we put the myth of the youthful blog reader to rest.

The Commentocracy rises online, Politico.

Web sites ranging from the smallest of blogs straight through to The New York Times are struggling to discourage spammers and bomb-throwers without tamping down the larger, productive give-and-take.

Writers and editors have become obsessed with comment tallies (even if many don’t deign to read the comments themselves), which have become a favored, albeit unreliable, barometer for determining editorial success and tapping into the political zeitgeist.

“I’ve seen great blog posts and great articles that get zero comments, and some of it is the writing,” says LATimes.com Executive Editor Meredith Artley. “I also see people try way too hard to get comments. I think it’s nice to engage at every turn but the number of comments you get on a story and blog post isn’t everything. We have to tell a lot of new bloggers that here. They get upset after a month or two that they are only getting a handful of comments a day.”

Good-bye, Google Bomb, Washington Post.

So why haven't bloggers stopped trying to game the system? Work-arounds may be one reason. So might the increasingly sophisticated nature of today's Google bombs -- what Open Left's Chris Bowers calls a "2.0 version of the Googlebomb" -- where the goal is to influence the search rank of a slew of negative news articles about a politician rather than tie his name to a keyword.

Klau said that he's "not aware of any [successful] Google bombs or equivalents over the past year" -- but the new efforts aren't Google bombs, per se.

GOP losing the new-media war, Politico.

While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.

While online Republicans chase the allure of punditry and commentary, Democrats and progressives are pursuing old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, in a fashion reminiscent of 2004. Back then, the Drudge Report and other lesser-known conservative portals played a key role in defining John Kerry and pushing back against criticism of George W. Bush, such as when conservative bloggers debunked documents purportedly related to the president’s Air National Guard service.