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.

Blogad revenue has returned to liberal sites. This just after I posted that blogad inflow had crashed. Great. As I post this, I'm sure that the blogad info is drying up once again, just to make this post inaccurate.

(Seriously, it is interesting to see advertisers returning to the political blogs.)

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.

According to Daily Caucus, Senator-elect John Thune of South Dakota paid two bloggers, Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek, $35,000 over a five month period:

Nowhere on [the] "Daschle v. Thune" [weblog] was there a disclaimer that he was being paid $5,200 per month by a candidate.... These guys spent every day attacking Daschle and promoting the "Rock Star" Thune. They had perfect timing on issues like the last minute Daschle lawsuit. How could they have known? Because Dick Wadhams had hired them! Lauck admitted that he had access to information he wouldn't have otherwise.

The heart of the last panel of the day, which was focused on how the Internet affected the outcome of Election 2004, was in the divergent presentations from Zack Exley and Chuck Defeo, who had parallel jobs running the Kerry and Bush Internet campaigns.

Exley was a tad defensive, given the complaints from the left that Kerry's online effort was too top-down and fundraising-obsessed and didn't do enough fostering of grassroots conversation or power. He parried those critiques by pointing out that they used the net to get thousands of people on the ground talking to voters, and given the Bush campaign's expected fundraising advantage, they felt it important to raise the money needed to keep pace in the ad wars. "We did listen to our base," he noted, describing how the campaign solicited stories from its supporters on how they had been affected by the Bush economy. "We got 100,000 responses which were put into a database. So when you saw people standing at a Kerry rally telling their life stories, those were real people telling real stories," he said.

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.

The Republicans are continuing to use the Net to encourage local political action. At the Republican Party site you can sign up to host an inauguration party. So far, 31,457 people have done so. I wouldn't be shocked if, in addition to Pin the Tail Real Hard on the Donkey, fund raising were a suggested party activity.

You can also buy your branded Republican goods on the site: $2.95 for a Bush-Cheney "yard sign system" (it's a system because it comes with little wire posts) and items such as a GWB medallion or a Ronald Reagan t-shirt.

HumanRightsFirst.org is live-blogging the Gonzales hearing. (They also have links to the Real Player feed from C-SPAN.)

Honest and sincere Dan Gillmor, a former colleague of mine at the San Jose Mercury New, has left the paper to head a start-up hoping to create a different kind of journalism, one that reflects the thoughts and trends outlined in his book, "We, The Media."

And, of course, he's got a blog up and running to detail his experiences.

Gillmor's politics trend to the left. So do those of his backers, Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyar. So it will be interesting to see how this project – which Gillmor is being deliberately vague about right now – will evolve. I am, as I think regular readers to this site know, not a great fan of wrapping information in value judgments. ("Doing good" is one, so is "don't be evil"). I worry that such sentiments aren't sustainable. They can often interfere with the delivery of of important insights and information. But that's my concern, not Gillmor's.

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?