Blogs and Negative Campaign Ads

In the last Presidential election, we saw certain blogs and websites emerge which professed to assess the veracity of campaign ads and statements by the candidates. Although I haven't been following the race particularly closely, I have noticed that in Ned Lamont's supporters in his race against Joe Lieberman choose not to wait for these sites to analyze Lieberman's ads - they link to the ads up on their unofficial Lamont weblog and make fun of them. It also seems to be one of the first places that Lamont's new ads apepar. Should the responses go over the top, well, it's unofficial. (And Lamont's campaign is doing quite well.)

I don't know how effective this is yet, but given that it is an inexpensive way to publish a response to an opponent's attack ads, and if done right may be one of the first places the media looks when covering campaign ads (you know - those "We don't agree with negative campaigning, but we will now play in full candidate X's latest attack ad" segments), I think we can expect to see this type of blog commentary in pretty much every contested race in the fall.