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.

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.

The final tally is still being compiled, but Evan Tracy of CMAG released his preliminary analysis of cross-media spending during the 2004 campaign at the 5th Annual eVoter Institute Conference this week. You can read some of the results in the latest CMAG Findings Memo.

According to Tracy, over $1.75 billion was spent this year across all media -- television, radio, print, and online. The campaigns accounted for 48% of the total and the parties picked up 27%. The remaining 25% was spent on local races and ballot initiatives.

Despite tremendous growth over 2000, online spending hardly made a dent:

Television - 91.2%
Radio - 5.1%
Newspaper - 2.9%
Internet - .9%

Perhaps more important than the actual amount spent was an understanding of why so little was allocated to the web. The consensus: old white men. The group agreed that until older traditional political consultants retire, television will remain the most important -- and for many, the only -- medium that matters. Looks like we've got our work cut out for us.

The good folks at EchoDitto have posted another in their series of "best practices" documents, this one offering basic advice on good online organizing. The hardest steps, in my humble opinion, are the first ones they list:

"Think strategically and take the plunge

* Ask: How do your audience’s goals fit with your organizational priorities?

* Identify the goals that your supporters will help achieve.

* Integrate your internet strategy into your overall organizing plan.

* Organizational buy-in: agree to fully support this effort (staff time, technology) and trust the community with what you’re asking."

Given that lots of organizations are hardly ready to make that leap, this is no small set of challenges. As the writers at Network-Centric Advocacy and Movement as Network have been arguing, a whole culture shift is implied in these questions. Hey, EchoDitto-heads, how do you convince the groups you work with to get over this hump?

Blogs for Christmas is a CivicSpace site that enables you to send an email subscription to one or more blogs to the recipient of your choice. Blog evangelism and/or spam!

Who are the PPF and RR? "We're a bunch of programmers, designers, and organizers who're working to change the way politics and media work. There are some amazing things happening at the intersection point between politics and technology, and we're all over it." They "see Blogs for Xmas as strategic evangelism for an already successful phenomenon. Blogs are more engaging than mass media and better for keeping people connected to the world around them, so the more people get their media this way, the better. We want our parents to read blogs. And we'd like to see eveybody's parents reading blogs. On most of our projects, we're forging ahead and making new tools to enable new kinds of interaction (like Blogtorrent). But there's also a huge need to take the great stuff that's already happening and expose it to a wider circle of people."

Be sure to check out the Pew Internet & American Life Project's recent report on the State of Blogging. The report, released yesterday, notes that blog readership jumped 58% in 2004. Fully 27% of Internet users now read blogs. Despite this huge increase in readership, 64% of online users still have no clue what a blog is!

Pew seems to diminish the blogosphere's importance as a political medium, pointing out that only 9% of online users frequented election-related blogs. However, other Pew studies indicate than just 40% of online users gathered political information on the Internet in the first place. Therefore, it seems that 23% those who read political news online relied on blogs. Not too shabby.

Read the full report here.

Internet users watch less television than individuals without web access. This according to a group of political scientists from the aptly-named Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society at Stanford University. They report that online users watch TV for 1 hour and 42 minutes a day compared with two hours for the ever-shrinking group of unwired Americans.

No big surprises here.

However, the study also suggests that television isn’t the only thing being cannibalized by online usage. An hour spent online also reduces face-to-face time socializing with family by a whopping 23.5 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes. I became tired and lonely just reading the findings online.

For a condensed version of the SIQSS study, read the New York Times article on the topic.

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.

Has Blogads finally met its match? BURST! Media, an online advertising network composed of niche content sites, announced today that it has formed a network of blogs on which companies can place ads. BURST! has taken an entirely different approach than Blogads. For example, BURST!

- sells on a CPM rather than a flat fee;
- allows advertisers to run rich media creative;
- follows the lead of Drudge in offering pop-ups;
- allows for geographical targeting; and
- generally offers a wider variety of ad sizes, placements, and sponsorships on each blog.

The initial impact of BURST!'s network will likely be minimal. They have only 20 blogs in their network -- although it counts Gawker Media as a member -- and political advertisers are more likely to stick to the inexpensive, flat fee Blogad model vs. expensive CPMs and minimum spend requirements.

While this blogger has suggested a few improvements to the Blogads product, many of which have been incorporated into BURST!'s offering, the jury is still out on which ad model will ultimately generate the most revenue.

In a post called Ethics, Kos addresses the recent Zephyr / Dean / WSJ / Armstrong-Williams-equivalency flap:

So to recap, if I write about something in which I hold a financial stake, I will disclose it. If I don't, then it's nobody's business. If other bloggers follow that rule, then great. If they don't, then great. If they have their own rules, then great. I could care less. This talk about ethics bores me, so I'm done discussing it.

As for the academic weenies -- I've told them to go to hell, I've given them a middle finger... that should do the trick. For now.