In all the post-election hub-bub, I missed this article in the liberal magazine The Nation. The author has much to say about how the internet is changing politics. Note these statistics:
§ About two-thirds of American adults use the Internet, and more than 55 percent have access to a high-speed Internet connection at either home or work.
§ More than 53 million people have contributed material online, according to a spring 2003 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
§ More than 15 million have their own website.
§ A new blog, or online journal, is created every 5.3 seconds, according to Technorati.com, a site that tracks the known universe of these easily updated websites. As of November 1, there were almost 4.3 million blogs, a million more than three months before. More than half of them are regularly updated by their creators, producing more than 400,000 fresh postings every day. (Full disclosure: My brother David is the founder of Technorati.)
§ A well-written blog, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, gets more than 500,000 monthly visitors--as many as the entire website of The American Prospect, the magazine where Marshall used to work, at a fraction of the cost.
§ Of the approximately 400,000-500,000 people who attended a political meeting through the social-networking site Meetup.com this election season, half had never gone to a political meeting before. Sixty percent were under 40.
§ Attendees of Meetups for Democratic Party presidential candidates reported making an average of $312 in political contributions last year.
§ A two-minute political cartoon lampooning both Kerry and Bush, put out by JibJab.com this past summer, had 10 million viewings in the month of July--three times the number of hits on both presidential campaign websites combined--and has since been viewed another 55 million times.
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