Radio personality Marc Steiner is the Maryland "embedded" blogger this week along with two colleagues, Justin Levy and Lea Gilmore, from the nonprofit Center for Emerging Media. The Guardian newspaper in Great Britain has arranged to pick up some of their blogs. They're also doing a nightly radio broadcast on WEAA-FM, the station Steiner joined after a messy divorce last winter from WYPR, the public radio station that was his longtime home.
Steiner believes that his centerforemergingmedia.com is a bit of an oddball at the proceedings: a blog that isn't overtly partisan.
"I think of most bloggers as almost like the 19th-century press. It's a very partisan bunch," he said.
Lowell Feld, whose RaisingKaine.com is the Virginia embed, acknowledges that the conventions may present a quandary for the partisan blogs if they stumble on something that could hurt the candidate they support.
"If politician X gets drunk ... and calls some woman some name, the next thing you know it's up on the blogs. I'd be surprised if something like that didn't happen," said Feld, author of Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics who is now working on a "guide to the political blogosphere."
He thinks the presence of so many people blogging at the conventions will test what physicists call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The very act of so many people observing what goes on will alter the way people behave.
He launched his political blog in 2005 out of great frustration with John Kerry's loss to President Bush in the 2004 election. He believes it did help propel Democrat Tim Kaine into the governor's office in Virginia, hence the blog's name.
Lee Rainie, who directs the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a Washington research group, thinks bloggers will alter the often staid and predictable convention coverage because they bring more attitude to their reporting.
"Bloggers might be the most likely commentators to go 'offscript,' " he wrote in an e-mail. "Bloggers are so ubiquitous they actually might be more likely to be on the scene of something interesting and newsworthy than mainstream reporters."
Even though Robert Hayes' Blogger News Network usually leans a little right of the political center, he was wowed by the welcome mat the Democrats laid out for bloggers, in particular their online communications director Aaron Myers.
