Let me remind anyone who takes the time to read this long-winded article that, in the late 90's, conventional wisdom was that traditional brick and mortar companies were going to be driven out of business by new competitors on the Internet. The Amazons of the world were supposed to lay waste to all rivals, and everyone would get all their products and services via the Internet.
Now, Amazon does still exist today, but only because they have diversified way beyond selling books and only because they formed partnerships with those "out-dated" brick and mortar companies they were supposed to replace. Unfortunately, hundreds of other Internet-based businesses were not so lucky. What happened? Retail stores across the country simply took their products online to augment their existing business structure, which gave customers the option to shop online or in-store. Not too long ago, my wife and I ordered a new base to our daughter's car seat using the Toysrus.com so that we could have a base in each of our vehicles, only to have the wrong product shipped to us. We ordered the base using their online store in the first place because our local store did not have what we wanted. However, when we discovered that we had been shipped the wrong base, we just drove the few miles to our local store, showed them our Internet receipt, and got our money back immediately.
And that is just one of many reasons why brick and mortar companies with good eCommerce models are not likely to be beaten by companies based purely on the Internet. We all learned that lesson when the dot com craze became the "dot bomb" in 2000. Now, less than four years later, we need to apply the lessons learned then to this new Internet craze called "blogging."
The fact of the matter is, blogs are not going to give any one Democratic candidate the unbeatable weapon that they've hoped for in the upcoming primary and the 2004 presidential election. Yes, they did give Dean an edge when his enthusiastic supporters saw to it that he became an early-adopter of this new fad, but that edge is all but gone now that his other major rivals, as well as President Bush, have established all the same innovations.
Blogs can help raise funds, they can help spread a candidate's message, they can even help get people to the voting booths, but they won't ever become a dominant factor in election-year politics. In the end, the best campaigns will still be those that employ traditional as well as cutting edge strategies and which have the discipline to know where to draw the line with technology. The trick is to do everything well, not just one or two things, when running a campaign, and to make sure that everything you are doing will win votes, not lose them.
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