Almost every day, as I sign online petitions and do my daily Hunger Site clicks, I am grateful for online activism. It's so easy to make our voices heard online, to contact our elected officials, to connect with other activists through sites like MoveOn and CODEPINK. This article, Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?, explores the potential impact of political blogs...

When journalists reject bloggers as cranks or wingnuts, they also do the same to a large segment of the American public who seeblogs as an expression of their views. Such dismissals feed the very alienation that makes blogs and bloggers popular.

The irony is that bloggers are most powerful when they work in tandem with the very media establishment they despise. “Bloggers alone cannot create conventional wisdom, cannot make a story break, cannot directly reach the vast population that isn’t directly activist and involved in politics,” says Peter Daou, who coordinated the Kerry campaign’s blog outreach operations. Blogs instead exert an indirect form of power, amplifying and channeling the pressure of netroots opinion upwards to pressure politicians and journalists. “It’s really a rising up,” says Daou.

Can this online rebellion lead to real political change? The prognosis thus far is encouraging, but far from definitive.

(Thanks to Feministing.com for the link.