As the presidential election approaches, how news media cover the issues and the “horse-race” aspects of this tumultuous turning point take on greater significance. (Or, perhaps less significance, in Matt Taibbi’s jaundiced view of how media ignores the real issues in favor of reporting on the horse-race. See Taibbi’s hard-hitting Rolling Stone piece.

Meanwhile, in an interesting sidenote, the New York Observer recently reported on a (leaked? genuine?) memo from Craig Whitney, standards editor of the New York Times, warning staff away from any visible political role.

To preserve the newspaper’s aura of fairness, Whitney enjoins Times staff from displaying political views via bumper stickers on their vehicles or campaign buttons on their clothing. He goes even further; although some may feel that these prohibitive policies go too far. He also prohibits staff from contributing to or collecting money for any political candidate or election cause, warning of the ease with which donor information can be accessed and how disclosure of political donations by Times employees would suggest to some observers that the newspaper is taking sides.

Although he tempers this with the concession that (according to the Observer’s version of Whitney’s memo) “staff members are entitled to vote,” this prohibition seems excessive, even for the “grey lady” that this dignified and would-be authoritative source portrays itself to be.

Doesn’t the Times itself endorse candidates and causes? Can it legitimately claim this right for itself while forbidding it to employees?

Maybe we can’t yet vote online with our computers, but Barack Obama’s campaign Web site offers just about every other possible political activity; a myriad of politically engaged activities you can do with your computer mouse. It exemplifies Facebook politics or the use of Web-based social networking in political campaigns.

Of course, this is not new. Howard Dean’s abortive presidential campaign relied on e-mail to an unprecedented degree, and marginal candidate Ron Paul exercised surprising online fundraising clout more recently. However, the multi-option flexibility of the Obama site and its ability to engage participation is remarkable and remarkably effective.

For example, since will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas produced his video of Obama’s “Yes We Can” proclamation, it has been viewed 18 million times, first on YouTube and now on Obama’s own site, www.barackobama.com.

Under the “Make a Difference” menu, visitors can “Find Events,” “Make Calls,” “Register to vote” and “Volunteer.” Each is an opportunity to participate, to join - building relationships rather than just chasing donations, as many campaign sites do.

A site visitor who clicks on the “Make Calls” button of Obama’s site receives a list of phone numbers and an audio tutorial outlining key messages, for example. Elsewhere on the site, visitors can sign up for text-message updates on their cell phones or download one of 12 Obama-themed ringtones.

The “Obama Everywhere” menu offers links to Obama-dedicated areas on 16 Web sites ranging from those for general audiences - Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, for example - to those targeting demographically- or ethnically-defined groups, such as BlackPlanet, Eons and Glee.

Of course, Obama’s site solicits donations, but through a variety of imaginative options that engage donors as solicitors themselves. This strategy proved so effective that it raised $55 million in a month when Obama did not host a single fund-raising event.

Whatever the outcome of the November presidential election, Obama wins the title of our first Web 2.0 candidate.

Among the world’s 9,000,000 blogs - 40,000 new blogs launch daily - are personal diaries for and by every sort of personality, with every kind of interest, and an equally diverse array of business opportunities.

Blogging represents a communications revolution as profound as Gutenberg’s Bible, exploding the once-confining truism that a free press exists only for those who actually own one. If Gutenberg made mass media possible, blogging is media by the masses, without - so far - libel laws, truth-in-advertising constraints, “equal-time” fairness doctrines or other restrictions. Everyone can blog, even companies, and anyone can say anything in a blog.

Companies can dialog with customers (and prospects) with greater candor and directness through blogs than through advertising, answering questions, introducing products, staving off criticism.

They can also use the blogosphere as a vast market research organization, monitoring blogs for opinions on their brand, products or services through such filtering functions as Technorati or PubSub. They can mine the blogosphere through RSS feeds - Really Simple Syndication - “aggregator” tools that capture, collect and deliver selected insights on issues, style cues and potential products.

RSS feeds also deliver packaged content, as a subscription does in the print or cable TV environments, distributing text, video streams and audio podcasts. This may be the most precisely targeted direct marketing tool ever devised.

The importance of these innovative marketing and market-research strategies is growing with the number of blogs. Yet many businesses are still resisting this rising tide. Since blogging and most blog measuring and aggregating tools are so inexpensive to operate, this Luddism is becoming increasingly expensive in lost opportunities. Just as families turned to their teenagers to prevent the clocks on their VCR’s (remember those?) from repeating “12:00, 12:00. 12:00″ for days after power outages, companies should turn to their younger, tech-savvy staff to lead them to the opportunities blogging and blog-mining may mean to them.

The cultural and style preferences of white people are hot topics: who knew?

Well, Christian Lander did. In January, he launched his blog “Stuff White People Like” and by mid-March – almost faster than you can say “DSL” or “Web 2.0 – it had excited such a buzz that he had a six-figure book deal.

First off, what DO white people like? In his first post, Lander suggested they like coffee, farmer’s markets, film festivals and different religions from those of their own upbringing. It rapidly turned out that white people also really like Lander’s blog itself.

If Barack Obama’s famously candid recent speech on race in America energized a long-dormant conversation, Lander has made a major online contribution, exciting hyperactive dialogs on once-taboo subjects.

Soon, mainstream media joined the buzz: magazines and NPR were first to take notice.

Commenting on this phenomenon for ABC News, Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo explained the transformative effect of big blog buzz on Lander’s fortunes: “Conversation plus zeitgeist plus critical mass equals viral takeoff.”

In Lander’s case, the takeoff has reached an impressively high altitude, and with blinding speed.

When Joshua Micah Marshall won a George Polk Award last month, he became the first blogger ever to do so, and he was specifically cited for sparking the interest of traditional news media in a story that hadn’t previously earned much attention.

This is new, and it’s news - about the news.

Marshall is not the stereotypical basement-bound blogger, ranting over a keyboard while wearing last decade’s bathrobe. He has seven reporters sifting through mainstream news, doing their own original reporting and digesting notes from readers, then adroitly mixing information from many sources into posts on www.talkingpointsmemo.com.

As former Washington editor of The American Prospect, Marshall started his blog in 2001. By 2003 it had 60,000 page views on peak days, and advertisers were paying to be on the site.

Those readers and advertisers noticed that this was something new: newsgathering by accumulation and synthesis, followed by instant dissemination on the Internet. Through this process, Marshall and his staff discovered and made known the fact that numerous federal prosecutors had been fired for political reasons. Mainstream media soon took note as well, launching their own investigations into the Justice Department, as did Congress.

The results: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned, along with other Justice Department officials, and Marshall won the coveted George Polk Award.

Was it in retaliation that the Department of Justice dropped Talking Points Memo from the Department of Justice e-mail press release distribution list?

If so, it backfired badly when Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) asked Gonzalez’s replacement, Michael Mukasey about it, delivering an almost redundant black eye to the already disgraced department.

The results: Talking Points Memo is now back on the department’s distribution list, other bloggers are adopting Marshall’s methods, and mainstream newspeople recognize that they will sometimes be playing catch-up on stories bloggers put together first.

“Wikipedia only works in practice,” many contributors agree. They joke, “In theory, it can never work.”

In theory, an organically growing, self-correcting compendium of knowledge, all contributed anonymously, seems unlikely. Yet few who have ever resorted to this collaborative and cumulative assemblage of information would question its usefulness, or even its accuracy.

Let’s call it a done deal and marvel at the fact that Jorge Luis Borges originated the theory behind Wikipedia, the Internet, blogs and the Internet - in the 1940s. We should probably expect no less of the thinker who saw God’s “splendid irony” in his appointment as director of Argentina’s national library at the same time he lost his sight.

“The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal,” Borges wrote in “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in 1940, anticipating Wikipedia, whose 75,000 anonymous contributors have submitted more than nine million articles in seven years.

In “Funes the Memorious,” in 1942, Borges muses that reconstructing an entire day had taken an entire day, claiming more memories than all mankind since the world began. Now that “Life-loggers” wear audio recorders and cameras that snap photos of whatever they see, every few seconds, is there a better definition than Borges’s characterization for the compulsion to blog? Even fictional characters succumb to this desire: Playwright David Mamet writes a blog as Charles H. P. Smith, a character (played by Nathan Lane) in his new play “November.”

Also in “Funes,” Borges mused that, “every word I spoke, every expression of my face - would endure in his implacable memory.” The recording of almost everything can have remarkable and unforeseen consequences. When Sen. Hillary Clinton experienced an emotional moment on the campaign trail, on video, everyone worldwide could see it within hours, perhaps changing the course of the primary election in which she was campaigning.

Any librarian would love the concept of the infinite library that Borges, a librarian, sketched in “The Library of Babel,” in 1941. To Borges, this library was total, with “all that is able to be expressed, in every language.” He saw boundless hope for humankind in a collection of books that offered the solution to every problem. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University recently surpassed announced they’d digitized 1.5 million books, noting this advances toward the ideal of the Universal Library that will make all published works available to anyone, in any language.

The Universal Library, or Borges’s Library of Babel, may actually be the Internet itself, and the Bible, constructed by numerous authors, may be the prototype for Wikipedia.

Albany Times Union newspaper Senior Writer Steve Barnes recently reported that he had received only seven letters from readers of his 100 in-print Table Hopping column in the pages of the newspaper, but more than 1,600 reader comments to his 800 Table Hopping blog entries.

Naturally this touched off amusing apples-and-oranges questions:

Are readers of print publications more passive than those who read blogs online?

Do blog readers have a greater sense of entitlement, expressed in a willingness to dialog, than readers of print publications?

Does the relative ease of responding to a blog post, versus the mechanical cumbersomeness of writing a letter, mark blog readers as lazy?

An experienced journalist, Barnes himself anticipated this, acknowledging significant differences in the tone, space considerations, lengths and other aspects of his column and his blog, in short, their content and intent. This acknowledgement should be enough to block the obvious comparisons that people may be tempted to make, or not.

But another of his observations - that 13 percent of the blog’s posts answer questions from readers requesting recommendations - illustrates the usefulness of blogs as interactive new media. It also highlights the difference between the Web, as originally constituted of electronic pages of text and graphics, versus Web 2.0 with its interactive capabilities..

Information flowing in just one direction is increasingly obsolete, even in the print environment. Newspapers now often post their reporters’ e-mail addresses with their stories to facilitate contact, and for immediate interactive dialog, blogs present unbeatable speed and convenience.