Centerfield

Thanks For Your Comments

This is getting very self-referential, but the LA Times (free reg. requires) has a story lead about one of the comments on this blog.

Meet "Anna." You don't need to know her last name. And Anna may not even be "her" real name.

What you need to know is that a Web user by the name of Anna liked a photograph Rick Heller put on the Internet so much that she posted a compliment for the world to see. "Rick, thank you for this picture!" she wrote. "This is the kind of stuff I hoped to see out of you convention bloggers. =)"

The photo depicts a lawn planted with lace-up boots, arranged pair by pair in long rows. It's as though Boston opened its own Arlington National Cemetery, except the gravestones are made of tired brown leather. Heller put the photo on a Web page titled "Boots on the Ground" and typed this caption: "The American Friends Services Committee … put out this display of 900 pairs of combat boots which symbolize American casualties in Iraq."

Heller is one of dozens of bloggers who for the first time, as a group, were given press credentials to write about this week's Democratic National Convention in Boston. But this story is not about whether bloggers are journalists, or whether journalists can blog. It's about Anna and the 13 million other Americans who visit blogs, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and why the audience for political blogs ballooned during the convention even as TV broadcast ratings tanked.

The answer lies buried online in public messages from readers to bloggers.