In his thought-provoking new book, “We The Media - Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People”, Dan Gillmor argues that an inevitable consequence of what he calls the complacency of today’s mainstream press - and for that read big corporate media - has been the growth of citizen reporters, represented most directly by the rapidly growing number of people who write web logs, or blogs.

Gillmor, who has been a close observer of the cutting edge of new media for the past decade, is the technology correspondent of the San Jose Mercury News - itself something of a groundbreaker in the online newspaper field.

So it’s significant - particularly in how we think about our coverage of politics - that someone like Gillmor should equate the importance of the modern-day blogger with the likes of Tom Paine and the pamphleteers of the revolutionary war.

That raises some interesting ideas. What if the Continental Congress in 1775 had been blogged, for example? Would George Washington or the other founding fathers have been able to keep the people’s focus on their message of resistance and unity if they were being constantly micro-dissected by a roving gang of scribes more interested in which Philadelphia ale houses they were dining at?

But Gillmor has a serious point. By drawing a direct line through various innovations in communications technology, from early printing presses to audio and video blogging; he illustrates how the evolving nature of information distribution necessarily changes the relationship between those who produce the news, and those who consume it.

He cites Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler to bolster his case, but significantly also invokes more contemporary ideas like the Cluetrain Manifesto, and the notion of news being a conversation; with a news story almost being a starting point for an ongoing intellectual process, rather than the tightly defined one-way street of a traditional ‘one-to-many’ publishing model.

So, while much has been written this campaign season about candidate blogs - particularly in the context of Howard Dean’s use of the internet in his quest for the Democratic nomination - where better to put Gillmor’s assertions to a real world test and take a snapshot of the role of citizen blogs in modern civic discourse than at the party conventions?

After the Democratic party gathering became the first to officially accredit bloggers alongside “real” journalists, with some 35 or so - including established online opinion journals like Jay Rosen’s Press Think and the Daily Kos - following the minutiae of the Boston convention, the Republicans had 16 ‘official’ bloggers inside the hall alongside the multitude of commentators passing judgment from basements throughout the world.

For the accredited bloggers, the reader numbers did not appear encouraging. According to CBS Marketwatch, the audience for their blogs was “barely noticeable”, and combined they were receiving less than 0.22 per cent of web traffic.
But for bloggers - like many niche publications in the dead-tree world - considerably more important than size of the audience is who the readership is.

In an online chat room recently, Gillmor aptly quoted a fellow blogger misquoting Andy Warhol: In the blogging world, he said, “everyone will be famous for fifteen people”.

At both conventions - although predictably less so in New York - interest in the bloggers and their output was undoubtedly heightened, in one of those perfect post-modern moments, by the mainstream press itself; looking around for offbeat angles and anxious to avoid charges of becoming the party’s stenographers at such tightly stage-managed - and, frankly, content-poor - events.

Of course another inevitable, but potentially negative, aspect of life in the blogosphere is the tendency to reinforce partisanship. Most politically-inspired blogs are opinion-based and naturally from one side or the other. Blog readers can therefore, if they so choose, exclusively read only those blogs which reinforce their own beliefs.

By allowing the audience to actively choose which opinion it hears, by implication, as Cass Sunstein argues in his excellent book Republic.com , we also allow it to filter out those opinions it doesn’t want to hear.

And what’s the end result of not forcing citizens to engage with opinions and ideas they might not agree with, or even have not been previously exposed to?

Could it be a more polarized society, with a declining confidence in traditional, filtered, sources of information and a political debate characterized by conflict instead of consensus?

Possibly.

Elsewhere this month, online retailer Amazon.com launched a political commentary section on its site, which features short interviews with political pundits and - of course - links to their books.

Among the writers featured are Al Franken, the liberal satirist and author of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”, as well as “Daily Show” presenter Jon Stewart - whose “America - The Book” is tapping into the huge popularity of the late night cable show where a truly scary number of 18-30 year-olds get their campaign news.

Right-wing perspectives are offered by Ann Coulter and former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan; while novelist Gore Vidal and the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward are also among authors on offer.

Amazon’s move comes after it let users make political donations to presidential contenders through its site. When the feature was discontinued ahead of the conventions, more than $300,000 had been raised through Amazon for 14 different candidates, with an average contribution of $43.

At the moment, there isn’t a forum area for public interaction, apart from where customers can post the usual Amazon reviews of the various books, but the implications of using the retailer’s intelligent agent software - which recommends book or music choices to a returning site visitor - in a political environment are worth pondering for a moment.

Imagine that as each poster to a discussion forum returns, Amazon’s profile of their political preferences could become increasingly sophisticated - asking for more specific information each time, and charting their leanings and opinions on a number of key issues - in order to offer them “recommended candidates”.

From the choices for President right down to their local contests - and user profiles, of course, can be geographically tailored - participants could then be offered candidates whose voting records and opinions most closely resemble their own; even matching voters with candidates who are dog-lovers, or Green Bay Packers fans.

At the same time, the most frequent voter participants in the forum would likely end up with the closest matches, since more detailed information would be known about them than about a casual visitor.

But it’s probably best not to take this daydream too far for now; since one implication is that if such a process became a tool for mass participation, candidates might attempt to skew their stances, compromise their legislative agenda, or adopt a deliberately vague and non-committal platform in order to be “matched” with the broadest group of voters.

And of course that would never happen.

Steve McGookin, a journalist at the Financial Times, is writing a doctoral thesis at the University of London on the intersection of politics, the media and the internet.

He can be contacted at stevemcg24@yahoo.com