Hot off the presses,
Chris Bowers of MyDD and
Matthew Stoller of The Blogging
of the President study up on the right and left blogospheres
and their different relationships to the country's political discourse.

Sample conclusions:

• "The single most important difference between the blogospheres is
  this: the progressive blogosphere is introducing new actors into the
  political scene. The right-wing blogosphere is facilitating further
  organization of what wasalready a fairly coherent political world."
  
• "If they do not invest time, energy and resources building a
  local blog infrastructure superior to that currently possessed by
  conservatives, the comparative advantage of progressives' overall traffic lead will be significantly reduced."
  

An interesting report, and not the first to observe that some major
conservative sites seem strangely uneasy with comments sections and
community blogging, which are the norm on the left. But I sense a
bit of question-begging here: blogs are plentiful enough to have
ecological characteristics. Surely there is or has been or will
soon be a right-wing blog with the architecture of a Daily Kos
... so, will the right tincture of system structure, erudition and
publicity turn it into a monster, or not?

Besides DemocracyInAction, there are three other big-name providers of Internet activism tool kits -- Convio, GetActive and Kintera. And the most controversial and commercially aggressive of these is Kintera.



Though we're none of us market hounds and pretend to no expertise at
reading the tea leaves of opaque financial press releases and one-day
market behavior, Kintera -- the only publicly traded company in the
sector -- dropped 5.5% today after announcing after market close yesterday
that it would be postponing its second-quarter financial release and
restating its first quarter finances to show a larger loss.

We've been looking for the right kick-start to roll out the DemocracyInAction blog, and it arrived this morning in the form of the Washington Post's coverage [login required] of the Democracy Alliance:

"At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or
more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to
compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the
past three decades."

Welcome on the face of it, though this is hardly the first attempt to address the long-obvious infrastructure imbalance. The hue and cry for more liberal money, better deployed, has been out there in many different quarters for years -- see here (1995) and here (1999), for starters, or here if you're writing a graduate thesis on the subject. So it's fair to say that the jury's going to be out on this for a while, and the first test of the donors is whether they can hold the course for even a few years. As a progressive development officer, however, I readily welcome any move towards multi-year, general operating funding in the sector.