"While direct income from [Iain Dale's] blog has been modest – ads provided by Google Ads and Message Space earn Dale about £7,000 a year – its value in promoting his “brand” has been huge."

"A study of blogs and audience engagement during the week before the fall 2006 elections found that most newspaper staff-produced blogs contained a small number of postings, failed to create much interaction between the blogger and the audience and attrac

"[Y[ounger voters tend to be not just consumers of news …but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news … they are replacing the pr

"BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level o

"There is an obvious conflict of interest when the person deciding on the disclosure of MPs’ expenses is himself receiving quite a substantial amount of this public money himself."

Mark Schraver looks at dumpster diving by police, opposition researchers, recruiters — and journalists.

"Blogs have never completely lived up to their early hype. They haven’t made many bloggers rich, or ushered in a new era of ‘citizen journalism’, or wrested control of political debates from the mainstream media. But they are gaining political importance.

"There really is no simple definition for what a citizen journalist is, just lots and lots of examples," says Dan Gillmor…

"Gordon Brown’s invitation to the Daily Mail editor to investigate access to government documents shows once again that the prime minister keeps his friends close and his enemies closer"

"[E]ven the campaigns concede that many caucusgoers in Iowa are happily encased in an old-media bubble, immune to the digital overtures of the modern presidential campaign and much more tuned in to commercials on television than to videos on a candidate

"British intelligence has long used clandestine "undeniable briefings" to release information real and false to tame hacks including David Rose…"

"Our top-selling daily seems to have taken against Gordon Brown. But does it matter any more what the Sun says?"