U.S. Political Campaign Discourse Explodes Online

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In the process, members of the public are becoming new big players in the campaign. In 2008, 30% of Internet users did at least one of nine activities that Pew labels as content sharing or creation, including posting their own commentary online, forwarding to friends and family videos or political commentary they find online, and signing up for online petitions. More than one-fourth, or 27%, go online once a week to do something related to the campaign. "This is the unseen force that didn't exist," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan group that tracks the influence of politics and technology. "My 81-year-old dad e-mailing Barack Obama's speeches or Jon Stewart's videos to his 50 friends—he's part of this force that's turning citizens into pamphleteers, whether they know it or not."

Bloggers and traditional media of all stripes are tapping into this. It can be basic things, like The Daily Show asking people to contribute captions for offbeat photos, or the Talking Points Memo group of blogs asking readers to help analyze a flow of documents on such issues as the Justice Dept.'s controversial firing of U.S. attorneys.

A-List Political Blogs

Bloggers are more important than ever during this Presidential campaign, gaining credentials to cover events and conventions and being briefed alongside traditional media reporters. Indeed, according to Pew, almost one-quarter of Americans, or 23%, now read blogs about politics or current events.

Of course, not all political blogs are created equal. There's a relatively small number of A-list blogs that are substantially shaping the political debate, says Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake, a popular liberal-leaning blog. Since 2006, the increasing prominence of sites like Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Daily Kos, have made it harder for up-and-comers to make names for themselves.

Bloggers who aggregate other blogs and information do particularly well amid this jumble of voices. Case in point: left-leaning The Huffington Post, whose founder Arianna Huffington was chosen by BusinessWeek's editors and readers as one of the most influential people on the Web. The Huffington Post is also ranked No. 1 on Technorati's Top 100 blog list, while the conservative Pajamas Media is ranked No. 55. Roger L. Simon, CEO and co-founder of Pajamas Media, says the site's traffic has doubled over the past year to about 42 million page views in August. "The actual election has given us a huge shot," Simon says.

Huffington is awed by the sustained level of interest in this election. According to Google Analytics, The Huffington Post's audience has grown fourfold this year, hitting 12.5 million visitors in August. "It's also been fascinating to watch the rapidity with which a news cycle can change by the hour these days, instead of by the day," says Huffington. "News really has become a 24/7 operation." With the help of the Web, Huffington, Simon, and Stewart are staying on top of it all.

Green is an associate editor for BusinessWeek .