It's either that or lobbying. To be blunt, many of these folks know about as much about managing an Internet business as Bob Dole knows about the chemical makeup of Viagra. They plead ignorance about servers and banner ads and cookies. There are 120,000 local elections a year. We read about a few hundred of the most prominent ones.
Most people are concerned about local issues involving school boards, city councilmen and -women.
That's where the real intense action is on the political side. As the presidential race heats up, new for-profit political Web sites are launching almost every week. Their business models are all based on attracting a lot of people to content or chat rooms or polls or on making it easier to e-mail elected officials. They all seem to believe they'll reach solvency by attracting advertisers, which tends to overlook the tendency of people on the Internet to turn to already trusted brands for information and commerce. The Internet has already changed commerce and it's going to do the same thing to politics.