The most popular political weblogs have been able to support their publishers through an intermediary called Blogads. As this election season heated up, most of the top sites saw extreme traffic spikes and have been able to set lucrative- but- competitive prices for ad views (not clickthrough) on their sites.

The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) began from "a proposal to develop a pilot project in one county in California" and has spawned the voter verifiable, open-source
Electronic Voting Machine project:

Echoditto, one of the new Internet strategy firms that rose from the ashes of the Howard Dean campaign, has posted a handy list of "best practices and tips for online fundraising."<!--first--> The firm also has a pretty interesting blog.

Chris Bowers of MyDD and Bob Brigham of Swing State Project have combined their intellectual forces to make a very cogent point about the state of state Democratic parties and their failure to understand the potential of the "netroots." In the wake of this weekend's meeting of the Association of State Democratic Parties, Brigham discovered that 3/4 of those state parties do not have blogs. Calling this a "sign of incompetence," (after all, you can set up a rudimentary site on blogger in a matter of minutes), he writes,

While almost all of these states have a mechanism for accepting online donations, none of them decided to catapult their online campaigns by having a blog. Likewise, almost all of these websites ask people to volunteer without offering daily reasons why their time is needed.

Bowers adds:

Don't miss the intense and heartfelt discussion underway over at DailyKos between Markos Moulitsas and Zack Exley, formerly the Kerry campaign Internet director, and before that one of MoveOn's brightest organizers. It started with Kos calling Exley an "idiot" based on comments reported by noted net contrarian Andrew Orlowski. Exley's detailed response (entitled "Dear Markos and friends," a far friendlier headline) appeared on the site a few hours later. Many smart comments from people who worked in the trenches are attached to both missives. Matt Stoller has been working this vineyard too on the Blogging of the President, here and here. Many lessons to be studied and learned...And one cool note to consider: we're transfixed by a terrific debate between two guys whose average age isn't even thirty!

More on best practices for online organizing: See Tim Tagaris's article "My ATM Pin Number or Online Fundraising," over at Swingstateproject.com. Tagaris was the spokesman for Jeff Seemann's upstart congressional campaign, which Mary Lynn F. Jones covered for PDF back in October. HIs points are aimed at congressional candidates planning for 2006 who think they can tap activists' wallets without involving them in a larger movement, and while he's talking to progressives, everything he's saying applies to conservative movement types as well. I won't rehash everything he says, except to endorse his core point: "It isn't fundraising requests that breed successful netroots fundraising." It's the relationships, the involvement, the listening and the engagement.

Privacy isn't always a matter of unprotected data or unconstitutional seizures.

The A.C.L.U. is facing new scrutiny for compiling public data about its donors' affiliations. Is there a penumbra of privacy around the lives we live publically, but somewhat facelessly?

In a December article about "dating blogs," author and constitutional scholar Jeff Rosen talks about the growing need for "new social conventions to resurrect the boundaries between public and private interactions."

As technology makes the traces our actions more visible, a new category of data is emerging: the "ripples" we leave behind.

Is this information fair game? Like the stories ex-girlfriends tell about contestants on reality TV shows?

Or do we need new "quarantine"-style rules around who can collect our ripples, and what they can do with them?

Initial response from the A.C.L.U.

The role of blogs and other forms of online citizen's media in spreading first-hand accounts of the tsunami disaster and in mobilizing relief aid has been phenomenal. Bloggers deserve to pat themselves handily on the back.

Bloggers rock. OK. Now what?

Can this new model of citizen-journalism and aid coordination be extended to disasters and human tragedies that don’t get so much mainstream media attention?

What can we do for Darfur, other victims of war and famine in Africa, and AIDS victims?

What can we do for the victims of yearly natural disasters - earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, doughts, etc. - for whom U.N. agencies have such trouble raising money?

How can we help organizations like Doctors Without Borders bring aid every day to the millions around the world in danger of dying deaths every bit as tragic as the tsunami victims?

"Undoing Industrial Revolution on Political Organizing," recently posted on Marty Kearns' blog, Network-Centric Advocacy, builds on points from Jakob Nielsen's post .

[The organizational forms of organization fostered by the Industrial Revolution are] a haunting legacy. Big groups are now effectively marginalized and a bulk of resources and talent are locking into industrial age advocacy operations. The writing is on the wall. The movement slowly moved away from a distributed public and into the hands of professional advocates. The challenge continues to be "feeding the beast" of industrialized advocacy which is driving resources away from the edges into the centralized leadership.

He goes into more detail about each point in his post but here are the highlights...

A lot has been written about the effectives of the Bush and Kerry Internet strategies, including details of money raised, volunteers recruited, and votes won using the Web. However, information about specific online advertising strategies has yet to be released by either side.

Addressing this concern, MSHC Partners has published details about the online ad campaigns conducted by John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee. [Full disclosure, I work at MSHC and helped direct the Kerry and DNC online ad strategies. From this point forward, I’m just going to write in the first person.]

The purpose of releasing this information is simple: to educate the political community about the effectiveness of online marketing. Continuity of key learnings has always been a challenge to all those who have worked in and around political campaigns. Campaigns shut down after elections and little is done to preserve information about the strategies that worked (and didn't work) best.