The Financial Times profiles BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart, with a particular focus on where he sees his place in the political news universe:

Clark Hoyt, the [New York Times'] public editor, wrote that it"stood still" after the damning [ACORN] videos were posted online. The newspaper"needs to be alert" to such stories"or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself", he wrote.

The Washington Post also was late to the story."One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like the Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints," wrote Andrew Alexander, its ombudsman.

Mr Breitbart says his distance from Beltway politics -- he works in the heart of liberal Los Angeles -- allows him to pursue his own agenda."I make no bones about coming from an ideological and partisan point of view. But at least I'm honest about it."

His network of websites includes BigHollywood, which aims to redress liberal bias in Hollywood and provide a forum for rightwing thinkers in the entertainment industry.

“I want to be the kingmaker," says Mr Breitbart."I want to find the best voices so that ideas and truth that have been suppressed for too long can find their way to a mass audience."

I realize I'm inviting much ridicule from my friends on the left, but I'm going to write this post anyway, and I'm going to leave the title intact - Why Twitter Matters & The Left Should Be Nervous. It's no doubt going to generate some giggles among the online intelligentsia in the Democratic Party. That's ok with me.

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here's one example courtesy of TechPresident's own Micah Sifry.

It's positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their "dominance" on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2

The very first time I saw a comment like that, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online.

There's controversy brewing around Barack Obama's pick for what's arguably the State Department's most important legal post. What's particular relevant for us here is how it's playing out almost completely within the realm of right-leaning political blogs. The nominee is Yale Law Dean Harold Koh, chosen to serve as legal counsel to Hillary Clinton's State Department. At issue: Koh's supposed comments regarding the possibility that Sharia law could be drawn on in U.S. court cases. The genesis of the pushback against the Koh pick was a letter from a New York lawyer republished on National Review Online's Phi Beta Cons blog in a post by Carol Iannone called "Yale Law Dean Goes Dhimi." (With Dhimi, sayeth Wikipedia, meaning the subjecting of non-Muslims to Islamic law.) In the letter, at attended at a Koh event reported that the dean made "at least one favorable reference" to Sharia. Any hint that foreign laws could provide a source of wisdom or a point of contrast in U.S. courts is anathema to many conservatives. So it wasn't all that surprising when that letter was picked up by former National Review associate editor Meghan Clyne. In a heated New York Post piece titled "Obama's Most Perilous Legal Pick" posited that Koh was ready to throw out a couple hundred years of U.S. jurisprudence in favor of Shariah.

Now the anti-Koh campaign is gaining much steam online, without much of a fight being put up by the left. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick surveys the uneven landscape surrounding the Koh fight: "13 pieces on far-right Web sites characterizing Koh as dangerous and anti-American; several Fox News stories, updated several times daily, one of which describes the anti-Koh screeds as 'burning up the Internet'; and a measly two blog posts defending Koh from these attacks."

We've been doing some housecleaning (in preparation for rolling out a site upgrade) and it's been some time since I dug in and updated our list of top political blogs. Indeed, an embarrassingly long time. Sorry!

Anyway, here's a fully revised and up-to-date list of the top 50 political blogs, along with two top 20 lists for the top liberal and conservative blogs. All three lists are based on Technorati's measure of "authority," which is the number of incoming links to the blog for the last six months. Let me be the first to emphasize that this is hardly a perfect metric. The number of incoming links shown by Technorati sometimes varies, which is a quirk of how their databases work. And not all incoming links are created equal, but Technorati has no way of saying so. In other words, please don't obsess about a blog's exact position on these lists, as bloggers like to say, your mileage may vary.

Check out Perspctv:An exploration of internet activity in reference to mainstream media. Gain a unique Perspctv on the US Presidential Elections.

This project presents different perspectives in our world, including that of Mainstream media and user-generated content on the Internet. Explore the similarities and the disparities, hear the many voices that have emerged and choose which view, if any, makes the most sense to you. What we think vs. what they say we think -- All the chatter on the Internet, all the traditional news media coverage, and all the pollsters -- Perspctv brings it all together in a simple and elegant manner -- and gives a unique "dashboard" picture of the elections at any one given moment in time, totally un-biased.

Karl Rove and Max Cleland spoke to over 100 online political consultants today in Washington, DC during Yahoo's The Rise of Citizen 2.0 event. Yahoo's Citizen 2.0 is not much unlike IPDI's Poli-fulentials , Roper's Influentials, or -- as Cleland noted -- the "attentive elites."

They're news-hungry voters with a heightened sense of civic responsibility and a penchant for online discourse. They’re involved in their communities and are the people "who get my friends to pitch in." They're more likely than others to agree with phrases such as "knowing what is going on politically is the responsibility of every citizen" and "the Internet empowers groups of people to get together and act."

For most of us in the audience, the presentation was an elaborately-delivered (think Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia) compilation of overused Pew research points and carefully-selected stock photos.

Clearly, we are not the intended audience. Those who would find this presentation helpful are those who still think internet users are 12-year-old kids in their mother's basement posting visceral blog comments in virtual echo chambers. In other words, Karl Rove and Max Cleland.

Blog this and blog that
Blog it all and blog a blogging brat
We don’t want a campaign that looks just like that
I don’t want a campaign that looks just like that

I am not a self-hating blogger, though I am a fan of Captain Kirk and the Sex Pistols. Personally, I think blogs are swell. I know bloggers. Bloggers are friends of mine. But online campaigns are not just about bloggers. However, after reading so much mainstream press coverage about Politics 2.0 lately (for example, in Mother Jones this month), one might conclude that the sun rises and sets only on blogs and the bloggers that write them. There is so much more to online campaigning that we do ourselves a great disservice when we narrow our focus too much on blogs.

The news is buzzing today as Fred Thompson has quit "Law & Order" in order to launch a presidential bid. He has also indicated he plans to use the internet extensively in his campaign. In a blog post to Pajama Media last week, Thompson wrote, "So, I hear you all have been talking about me." And thus begins his online conversation with voters. Clearly, the tone is intimate and personal, just as a blog post should be.

And it seems he really does understand the power of the internet to transform politics.

"Whether or not the Internet can elect any particular candidate in any particular race, it’s clear that all of you and our many friends across the blogosphere and the Web are part of a true information revolution. That’s why so much of my effort has been focused on talking to Americans through this medium. By empowering individuals and building communities, the Internet provides a way of going around the inside-the-beltway crowd to reach people in numbers unheard of not that long ago."

In a discussion about the recent French presidential election at the Personal Democracy Forum unConference this past Saturday, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry presented an interesting thesis: not only did Ségolène Royal's 'net-centric strategy fail to win a majority at the polls, but her campaign's emphasis on citizen participation may have actually backfired entirely by undermining her perception as a leader and by leaving her dependent on a fatally unrepresentative group of voters.

A friend sent me a link to a very good post on how PR firms should approach bloggers. It's sort of a "what to and not to do list". While aimed at people doing corporate PR, it is certainly applicable to campaigns as well. If you're thinking of opening your campaign up (and you should be), it is sage advice for you to follow.

Blogs are community-oriented web properties where readers are encouraged to engage in conversation. It's not supposed to be a one-way street like the mainstream media. This is why it's important to keep an informal, conversational tone when responding to the blogger and readers. Constructed and flat statements will be called out as "spin" and you will be accused of not addressing the issue. Remember, companies and organizations are made up of humans, so act like a human, not a computer delivering a line of programming.

This is well worth a read for anyone who interacts with bloggers - be it the candidate or the communications guy.