Don't believe me? Just ask Dan Rather how HE feels!

But, finally, let me focus for a minute or two on the political implications of the OSM community...

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE OSM COMMUNITY
Bloggers don't pretend to be free of bias. Quite the opposite. We bloggers live and breathe our biases. First of all, it's more fun and, secondly, it tends to generate more readers and greater overall traffic.

Which is why the Blogosphere is a powerful political tool already, and destined to become far more powerful still. It's the new campaign frontier.

So what should political parties do to take advantage of this new frontier?

First of all, they should seek to strengthen their network of bloggers, offering blogging tools, features and even space on the Internet for active supporters. From there, mining these sites, and opposition sites as well, for ideas and data on a daily basis becomes paramount.

What stories are popular among bloggers? What are common themes? What opinions are being expressed? What input can be given to the community to help spread commentary and news favorable to one campaign and detrimental to the other? How can the OSM community reach out to help shape some of the content in the traditional and alternate media communities? These are just a few of the questions a campaign should ask when reviewing OSM content.

In addition, Political parties should NOT assume that keeping their own blog, mining the Blogosphere for content and ideas, and connecting to supporters via the Internet is enough. Face-to-face activities are still necessary, only, now it is an opportunity for junior campaign members from each party to go on tour as well in order to reach out to bloggers.

They can maintain online campaign resources, schedule events, send message, mine the OSM world for new ideas and information, and get out on the trail themselves to help turn virtual campaign support into real votes on election day. It's a fun new challenge for partisans, one that will help bring younger supporters to prominence in their respective parties and create real and strong relationships with the movers and shakers of the OSM world.

Parties should identify some of their strongest supporters from the OSM community in each state, arrange special events, and then SPECIFICALLY INVITE bloggers to those events. Corporations have learned that you can add tremendous value to virtual activities, such as meetings and training sessions, simply by using the tried and true method of identifying and inviting employees to virtual events in a selective manner rather than en masse, and then augmenting virtual events with live events.