The blogosphere goes to Vegas.

• Author: Elliott, Stephen
• Position: YearlyKos - Las Vegas - Conference news

When I think about YearlyKos, the June gathering of political bloggers that I was sent to cover by The Progressive, I think about Gina Cooper first.

Gina is part of the DailyKos blog founded by Markos Moulitsas. On DailyKos, readers are allowed to start their own blogs and also leave comments on each other's postings. It's a large part of why DailyKos is the most popular of the political blogs, with more than half a million hits a day. It's not a news source so much as a community. A community filled with people like Gina--left leaning, dedicated, deeply upset by the incompetence and corruption they see in a Washington political world dominated for six years now by rightwing Republicans to disastrous effect. And one day, when a blogger named Pastor Dan suggested they have a convention where everyone could meet in person and amplify their voice, Gina decided to make it happen.

It took a year and a half.

She had been a high school teacher in Tennessee, and she and her husband had just moved to California. Gina's income is crucial to their household, but Gina didn't apply for that new teaching job. Organizing the convention was a full-time position. She was not paid. She and her husband tightened their belts. She is what some in the political class would call easy exploitable labor. And what others, just as derisively, would call a true believer--i.e., she's sick with a case of TB. But Gina is a grassroots activist, part of a vanguard of the new political movement that has sprung up in opposition to the current establishment. One that has moved online and taken the name Netroots. One that may or may not change everything.

YearlyKos operates just like any other political convention. There are caucuses and roundtables and training sessions and more than anything else an opportunity to network. A little over a thousand attendees arrive.

But YearlyKos is not just any political convention. There is star power here. The mainstream media is here in force. There are major political players in attendance, including Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Governors Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack, and Mark Warner, and Senators Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid. All of them are eclipsed by Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos, whom the bloggers worship and the politicians defer to. From the Air America skybox, I am able to find Markos just by watching where everyone is looking.

The media and the politicians in attendance speak to the power of the blogs, which can raise millions of dollars for a...