That statement doesn’t bear scrutiny. Connecticut [CT] doesn’t have open primaries, only registered democrats can vote in CT democtratic primaries. So Lamont winning that represented the will of registered democrats. An election means anyone can vote, and that includes registered democrats, republicans, independents and non-party affiliated. Big difference.

The dailykos website raises non-trivial amounts of money – the democratic party cannot ignore them. That they aren’t interested in winning falls short given the result of a couple of days ago. They acted as an important central resource of information, money and organisation in the run-up to the mid-terms.

Of course Tim wins. I read his stuff at blogocracy and the quality has not dropped. His competition in that arena is pretty weak; Bolt et al. Tim’s built his own audience at surfdom in part because the MSM pundits were so crappy.

Patrick, And do you realise that Sullivan was blogging for five years before moving to Time?

Yes, but like Blair he was already well entrenched in the media and had the ability to put his views through MSM already. Compare that Andrew Leigh who had no guarantee his op-eds would get published.

That Kos unites the lunatic fringe is sure, but they remain lunatics: no better demonstration is needed than the Lamont farce.

Lamont won his primary but couldn’t win in a wider electorate. The primary was to elect a candidate that registered democrats wanted to represent them in an election. I don’t see how it was a farce. That is how primaries work.

It isn’t the ‘dailykos’ itself that I am talking about though, it is the style of site where anyone can post articles. Redstate has the same structure, as do numerous other sites.

That Kos unites the lunatic fringe is sure, but they remain lunatics: no better demonstration is needed than the Lamont farce.

Bannerman, News is Australia’s leading media outlet by a country mile. The best illustration this time is that TimD, no fan as such, was obliged to link to The Australian every piece when he was focusing on AWB because no-one else was providing that kind of coverage. So who wins? We all do because people like TimD get more exposure in our national conversation.

I would like to agree with the Dunlop quote provided the bloggers do not use overly large academic words and overuse references to academic works the lay public may not be familiar with.

Dirigiste was the latest word I had to look up for example. An overabundance of word use like that is enough to discourage the public from reading your work.

So the public intellectual, still is currently viewed removed from the reality of society.

It is educational but when the writing becomes the form of speech, people look at it with disdain.

Media responds to the ‘mass’ part. Tim Dunlop is a cut above in quality and writing ability, but if he didn’t have one of the largest audiences in the Au blogs I doubt News would have come calling.

Dailykos’s daily hits rival newspaper circulation. Only aggregator sites like slashdot or fark get that type of hit rate. If it is a political site, usually the big audience ones are extensions of the existing mass media, like Andrew Sullivan.

On the night of the US mid-term elections I was refreshing several websites every few minutes for updates, (including abcnews, cnn, redstate and surfdom) and dailykos did as good as the news media in staying up to date with events on its front page.

I know one of the blokes that works behind the scenes on that site, and it was a pretty monumental effort to keep the whole thing up and running smoothly, he said they were expecting 3 million hits on election day. They were maintaining something like 10K-14K simultaneous connections. That is significant stuff.

Kos gets media and blog attention, but absolutely zero results as far as I can see. TimD is much more oriented to results, as demonstrated by his workchoices campaign and his assiduous attention to Iraq policy and particularly AWB.

Australia is yet to produce a dailykos/k5 yet where anyone can post articles/diaries to the site.

You mean like IndyMedia? Why would you want a format where you end up sifting through main blogposts which are dross? Comments are open to all comers already so that’s already present in the blog threads. No reason to open up the main blogposts to all and sundy.

Most of the Australian bloggers were on the fringes of public influence with the MSM and politicians anyway. The ‘punk’ bloggers in the Australian scene are surprisingly few in number in contrast to the American blog scene which is far more punk and entrepreneurial.

It may be a reflection of the demographics of Australia which has a small population but large educated class of internet savvy people. It could also be because the Australian MSM and party-machines are highly cloistered and closed such that it leaves a lot of smart people with good ideas outside of its fringes and blogging allows those ideas to get a wider audience quickly and easily without having to beg to the MSM’s and Party often contradictory and combative formats.

I think Australia has a long way to go before we can claim blogging or internet political debate is ‘people power’. Australia is yet to produce a dailykos/k5 yet where anyone can post articles/diaries to the site. So while it has widened the franchise of public influence the blog format itself is still limiting those that can get ‘in’ to the cool set.

Obviously it is an improvement to 1980s media and influence – it has certainly given me a voice but while it has widened the political commentary franchise, it isn’t there yet.