Credit: John Aravosis (from a trip to the White House in February)

Kevin Drum wonders if the sort of semi-off-the-record "blogger" briefing with Tim Geithner and other administration officials the Treasury Department organized for yesterday is really worth putting on the tie and/or good shoes for, as people like Felix Salmon, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, John Aravosis, Duncan Black, and Sam Stein did. Are these just dog and pony shows? Or does actual news get collected, relationships built, readers served? Writes Drum, who blogs on MotherJones.com:

Was it genuinely interesting, or just a bunch of the same-old-same-old? What's the verdict on this ancient Washington tradition?

The American Prospect's Tim Fernholz, who was part of the the event yesterday, pushes back against some of Drum's assumptions...

The New York Times' Ross Douthat riffs off of Mickey Kaus's plan to challenge Barbara Boxer in California's Democratic Senate primary to consider why more bloggers don't run for office:

There’s a reason for this, of course: American politics is much more of a retail business than politics in Canada or the U.K., and the kind of people who write about policy for a living aren’t usually the kind of people who excel at (or have any interest in) glad-handing and fundraising. But the past exceptions to this rule have included some of our most interesting politicians — think of the ex-historian Newt Gingrich, or the ex-sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. What’s more, many of today’s brightest lawmakers, from Ron Wyden on the left to Paul Ryan on the right, are people who seem like they could have been bloggers, journalists, or professors of public policy in another lifetime.

"Retail politics" isn't necessarily what it once was, at least it doesn't necessarily need to be. Online fundraising can, a la Barack Obama, potentially free candidates from some of these glad-handing events. And developing useful online relationships (as well as advocating for, say, public funding laws) is the sort of thing that bloggers might be particularly well-suited to do, what with their mastery of the web environment. Either way, Douthat is a fan of the idea of more blogger-candidates, writing, "let’s have more of it!"

Credit: John Aravosis

AMERICAblog's John Aravosis describes a trip to the White House made by nine progressive bloggers and/or reporters yesterday to meet with Vice President Biden's economic advisor, Jared Bernstein.

Mother Jones interviewsMother Jones interviews Eric Boehlert, author of Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press and a senior fellow at Media Matters. MoJo asks Boehlert whether political bloggers on the left are serving as effective watchdogs now that we've got Barack Obama in the White House and Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. They are, says Boehlert. He frames his answer by talking of a blogger who blends some journalist, some activist, and some cheerleader:

I think they've been doing a really good job. They've split their time up into three activities. 50 percent of it is just playing defense against the unhinged right wing response on how Obama is a socialist and a Marxist and he wants to take your guns. 25 percent is trying to prod and cheerlead when the administration does something that it likes and that it approves of or maybe has a liberal flavor to it, and the other 25 percent is critiquing the administration. We've seen it on war funding, we've seen it on gay marriage, we've seen it on wire tapping. I think there was this notion, particularly among the conservative critics, to say, 'well Obama is elected, and bloggers are going to roll over and they're just going to be a mouthpiece for the administration.' But that's not what happened and I never thought it would because the blogosphere was never created to be an appendage to the DNC or to cheerlead Democratic politicians. It was always created to give a voice to liberalism in America. Liberal bloggers are still going to do that. I mean, they're happy that a Democrat is in the White House who's more receptive to their priorities and their agenda, but they're not just going to stop because a Democrat is in the White House.

Boehlert doesn't make the connection, but when he says the economics of progressive blogging are "frankly...pretty awful" and with few institutional funders -- well, beyond the omnipotent George Soros, of course (kidding!) -- there's an argument to be made that it's in fact this hybrid journalist-activist-critic-watchdog style of blogging that makes it difficult to match some bloggers with deep-pocketed supporters. At least, traditional funders who are looking to check a box when they write a check. That said, it's difficult to separate out the poor state of political blog funding from the general poor state of the economy, and the disastrous state of news publishing in particular.

Gathered in London today for the G20 Summit aren't just Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the like. They're being joined by 50 or so bloggers from around the world, under a program called G20Voice sponsored by OxfamGB, Comic Relief, Save the Children, the ONE campaign and Blue State Digital. The assembled bloggers are, says the program, amongst "the world's most interesting and influential," and the full list is available here. The chosen bloggers are featured in a photo spread worthy of TED speakers and are being farmed out for interviews. Credentialing new media for large-scale events isn't exactly new. Bloggers got the full media treatment at the recent Clinton Global Initiative in New York. And Blue State's Sam Graham-Felsen mentions that the inspiration for G20Voice was the Big Tent at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer. But treating bloggers as media might be a somewhat newer experience for bloggers from Nigeria, Turkey, Brazil, and the other lands represented in London this week.

What happens when Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler put their giant brains together? Media Cloud, it seems. The new project from the Berkman Center aims to inject some actual data at the the "Is the Internet kryptonite to the news business?" debate. (Oh, those Berkman Center kids, what with their research and evidence and inductive reasoning.) Some of Berkman's driving questions mirror key questions in online politics. Are political bloggers breaking news stories or merely feeding off the decaying carcass of traditional media? Does the disaggregation of news leaving gaping holes in what we now know about corruption, legislation, and public policy? The debate about the future of political media is nearly unintelligible without answers to those questions.

Enter Media Cloud...

Bloggers on the left have kept alive questions about Palin's "Bridge to Nowhere" claims and are goading the press into asking them; Larry Lessig asks where McCain might make change on the tech front; Obama supporters are using Craigslist-meets-Team-in-Training to connect volunteers to those willing to pay for their travel; making, frankly, a giant leap in the use of tech by the U.S. intelligence community, several agencies are launching a new social network for spies; and a good deal more.

Bloggers on the left have kept alive questions about Palin's "Bridge to Nowhere" claims and are goading the press into asking them; Larry Lessig asks where McCain might make change on the tech front; Obama supporters are using Craigslist-meets-Team-in-Training to connect volunteers to those willing to pay for their travel; making, frankly, a giant leap in the use of tech by the U.S. intelligence community, several agencies are launching a new social network for spies; and a good deal more.

On Wednesday (June 11), I joined a panel of eCampaign Directors for major presidential campaigns at a forum called, what else, the first 21st Century Campaign, sponsored by Google and National Journal. Peter Dauo for Senator Clinton, Mark Soohoo for Senator McCain, Joe Rospars for Senator Obama, and me, former Director of eStrategy for Governor Romney’s presidential campaign, rounded out the panel.

We discussed topics such as what it’s like to run Internet strategy for a major presidential campaign, the changing role of traditional media, what factors into a candidate’s success on the Internet, and whether the guerrilla tactics employed during the campaign will carry over to the White House for the candidate who is elected.