Salon profiles the Dean blogosphere

Hey, we're famous! The article tells the stories of the birth of Dean Nation, Dean Meetup, and blogforamerica.com (or rather its predecessor). It also quotes many names that will be familiar. Get the Salon Day Pass and read the whole thing. Here's just one piece:

But political experts don't seem to know what to make of Dean's Internet strategy. Many of them have discounted it. Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, told the Washington Times on Wednesday that she was "skeptical" of Dean's boasts about what the Internet could do. And William Mayer, a political scientist at Northeastern University, says that he's "not convinced that a whole lot of his success is attributable to the Web." The skepticism is understandable: When you slip into Dean's online world, with its all-Howard-all-the-time ethos, one can easily mistake the obsessive love of a certain activist few for something larger and more momentous. But it is easy to wonder how real it all is.

But if you ask that, says Karl Frisch, a professional political consultant and a full-time Dean blogger, you have to also ask whether the alternative political reality -- that of the "Washington media establishment" -- is any more "real." "How many times have they been wrong?" Frisch asks.