PolicyByBlog

I just finished and sent to the publisher the first draft of a book on political blogs called BLOGWARS (Oxford University Press, 2007--I hope!).

This website, while serving other purposes as well, is partly an extension of that book. As I note in another document in this section, there are several limitations to the book form being used to talk about blogs. So I hope the book and this site will become blog-like, that is symbiotic, accretive of the wisdom of many, a thread of conversation. Let us all speculate about a fast-moving phenomenon whose direction, development, and destinations are unknown and probably unknowable.

BLOGWARS is subtitled THE POLITICAL BATTLEGROUND.

From 1999, when I first noticed something called a "we-blog" (pronounced wee-blog), then "blogs" through the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004, where from the vantage point of Ames, Iowa I saw the influence (and effluence) of blogs on the campaign of Howard Dean for president, I appreciated that something novel and exciting was changing political communication as I knew and taught it. Here were "uncredentialed" folks (a) bypassing regular "big" media, (b) creating personalized mass communication messages without formal training (like, say, attending a journalism school), (c) reaching, in some cases, large audiences, and (d) having a range of effects on contemporary public opinion, political campaigns, public affairs argumentation, and even governmental policy-making. As well, the political-media system was adopting the blog form--if not always the blog spirit--which is the main topic of this blog.

See the table of contents of my book: