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.
"CONGRATULATIONS!!!!" wrote Carolyn Armenta Davis, virtually screaming in a convention-eve message to Christopher M. Rabb, who writes the Afro-Netizen blog. "With Afro-Netizen an official blogger for [the] 2004 Democratic convention, Blacks and other enlighten[ed on]es have uncensured opportunities to read uncensured opinion from the Blacks both attending and involved in the convention and those of us at home preparing to vote in November."
Davis was echoed by "Orange Mike," a Wisconsin delegate to the Democratic convention: "I hope to see the bloggers out there (at BOTH conventions) paying attention to the topics that get ignored by the newshandlers and arrangement specialists, out of a pathetic and trembling fear that something unscripted might happen," he posted on blogger Jessamyn West's site, Librarian.net.
