If anybody is interested in political blogging, here is a report on emergence of the progressive blogosphere from the New Politics Institute. The report provides an overview of the politics of blogging and the comparison of the progressive and conservative online political communities as well as gives suggestions for involving blogs and bloggers in political campaigns.

I'd say it's a very general report but it has some insights on what's going with political blogging.

Wikispaces - an online space for groupwork for ordinary people.

Wikispaces is a place for people to easily build web pages together. Anyone can join the site for free, create a space, and begin contributing within a matter of minutes.
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We're firm believers that wikis can be revolutionary tools for building communities. But most wikis are very engineer-focused: hard to use, buried under busy user interfaces, full of features only a geek could love. Wikispaces is our attempt to build a wiki that's easy to use and easy to adopt for all kinds of audiences. We've kept the tool simple so that you can focus on building content, talking with other members, and growing your community.

I wonder whether wikis can (will) be as widely adopted as blogs.

Even though Wikinews project has been up for quite a while, I just discovered it. From Wikinews manifesto:

We seek to create a free source of news ... build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.
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While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. ... Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.
While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

Very exciting project, it'd be interesting to get data on readership, authenticity and patterns of collaboration. I wanted to start the Russian section but then realized that I'm not sure why I would want to do it (besides that it's fun). I can understand Wikinews in English - the ideas of independent and grass-root media as well as the idea of wikis are quite wide-spread. But Serbian or Ukrainian Wikinews? Does anybody read them? Can people even find them?

I volunteered to maintain a new collaborative blog (ASIST SIG-BWP) created to support the ASIST special interest group on blogs, wikis and podcasting. As its name shows, the blog will collect and post information related to blogs, wikis, and podcasting (news, conferences, resources, etc.)

In addition to being another read in the relevant area, for me it will be a great chance to be in the community of smart and like-minded people.

Media Bloggers Association is a non-partisan organization consisted of bloggers and writers, who are interested in the development of media blogging and emerging citizen journalism.

Following up on recent discussion at Blogher conference as well as many others on "where are female bloggers?", here are the numbers of males and females in this association (I might have incorrectly figured out one or two but I tried to check all unclear cases):

• Out of 27 founding members there are 23 males and 4 females.
• Out of 133 other members there are 112 males and 21 female.
• Therefore, out of 160 members of MBA 25 are women. It's 15.6%.

I don't have any particular point here but it'd be interesting to estimate how many female media bloggers are out there. Is it the actial gender ratio of media bloggers represented? Or is it something else? Women's indecision or reluctance to join? Lack of information among them? Other circles of media bloggers with more women in them?