Blogosphere: Oxygen for the Right and Poison Gas for the Left?

That is essentially the argument of Michael Barone who believes Left-leaning blogs have pulled the Democrats ever-farther from the middle, while Right-leaning blogs have pulled the GOP back toward the center.

When four American contractors were killed in Iraq in April 2004, dailykos.com wrote: "I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them." This repulsive comment produced no drop-off in page views. This was what the left blogosphere wanted. Kos was an early enthusiast for Dean's campaign for Democratic chairman and disparaged other candidates... The right blogosphere's greatest triumph came after CBS's Dan Rather on Sept. 8 reported that Bush had shirked duty in the National Guard and the network posted its 1972-dated documents on the Web. Within four hours, a blogger on freerepublic.com pointed out that they looked as though they had were created on Microsoft Word; the next morning, Scott Johnson of powerlineblog.com relayed the comment and asked for expert views. Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs.com showed that the documents exactly matched one he produced using default settings on Microsoft Word.

I am still of the opinion that the Net is no different from 17th century pamphleteers who used cheap and easy printing presses to get out their ideas to the people in clever ways. The difference then, as now, is that the winners have new ideas to address old problems, while the losers can only sit around and complain.