Some of the most popular state, local, and general-interest blogs in the progressive blogosphere were brought low this morning, when the lone developer behind the hosted community-blogging service SoapBlox threw in the towel. Well-regarded sites like Pam's House Blend, Blue Jersey, Michigan Liberal, Swing State Project, and MN Progressive Project found earlier today that they couldn't access either the public-facing front ends of the site or their sites' content-management backend. As of this afternoon, the sites are (mostly) back up, but that hasn't eased fears that a core part of the left's online infrastructure isn't all that sustainable.

The liberal blogosphere has gone decidedly bi-polar in the Great Transition. On one side are the believers, betrothed to an image they conjured between the lines of conventional centrism, a group that is beginning to think that President-elect Obama is going to leave them waiting at the altar. They wait for their progressive swain among in a rising sea of centrist appointments, foreign policy hawks, and leaked favorites from the last Democratic administration.

On the other side are the cynical pragmatists - just as personally progressive as their heartsick brethren - but decidedly less ambitious in their perception of the Obama promise; this latter group tends to know their Democratic Presidential history and is likely to own a copy of Dennis Perrin's brilliant and instructive Savage Mules.

In the end, the history-reading cynics (and count me as a card-carrier) may end up happier with President Obama.

They'd Check the "It's Complicated" Box; The Oppositional Approach to Getting from Here to Five Million; Transition's Tech Team Taps Beltway and Beyond; Government Guide to Marijuana (Vendors); Nanobama, the Microscopic President; DC's Apps Contest Names Winners; Progressives' Annual Participatory Debrief; and more.

Covered: Online Right Sees a Chance to Take Root; While the Online Left Considers the President Elect; The Agenda Returns, Somewhat Tamed; Inside a Team Meeting; From World of Warcraft to Washington; Jobs in Internet Defense; and a good deal more.

The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini has created a stir. Patrick's arguing that right rooters, or members of the conservative online class, need to quit trying to be the next George Will and focus on producing more and better Karl Roves; I don't know, I thought Jim Brokaw Schieffer did a decent job moderating the presidential debate. Wait, those were three separate events?; The Google Earth team and the University of Richmond are offering up a bird's-eye look at how the U.S. has voted in presidential races going back to Ronald Reagan's Electoral College trouncing of Jimmy Carter; and a good helping more.

The full fury of the progressive netroots has turned on Minnesota Republican congressman Michelle Bachmann -- and it might put her House seat in jeopardy; The National Political Do Not Contact Registry's Shaun Dakin has picked up on the Twitter Vote Report idea and proposed using Twitter to track the automated campaign calls that have been in the news of late; The news today is that the Obama campaign raked in $150 million last month. That's a ton of money, and it frees Obama to compete in parts of the country where the math heretofore didn't make sense for a Democrat; and a good deal more.

November 4th, a.k.a. Election Day, is just 50 days away. Everyone from the presidential campaigns to independent activists are turning their attention to the ground game; Is the liberal-leaning Netroots getting played by the GOP? A provocative though unsigned comment highlighted by the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a passionate Obama supporter, makes the case that indeed it is; The Democratic National Committee's new "Count the Lies" addition to its McCainpedia wiki takes a savvy tack on fact checking; and a whole lot more.

Do the netroots -- a term now embraced by Merriam-Webster -- represent the Democratic party base or a small but vocal minority?; the DNC announces plans for a new online platform-crafting site much like the RNC's GOPPlatform2008.com; Latino bloggers react to the presidential campaigns outreach efforts; t-shirt contest!; and much, much more.

A few weeks back, I wrote a long post asking whether Obama's networked movement was going to do more than just work to elect him president. Well, it looks like the battle to hold him accountable to his promises has already begun, over his support for the FISA bill, and especially over a provision giving the telecom companies retroactive immunity for breaking the law when they gave the Bush Administration access to Americans phone records without judicial authorization.

Obama's neglect of the netroots bores progressive bloggers; Obama's broad coalition of supporters, cultivated online, may negate the need for the netroots; dueling "red telephone" ads and a much-needed parody; six seconds of silence on a Clinton campaign call; a new aggregation site has a misleading about page; what if Bloomie were stilling running?; and Off The Bus profiles a whopping 200 superdelegates.