Jonathan Chait has a big article on netroots blogging in The New Republic.

I was going to blog about it yesterday, but it bored me too much. It's long. I read it. You might think I hate to waste the effort and not produce a post, but it's something I do a lot. Unless I find something interesting, I don't post.

You know, the first time I heard about blogs, I imagined there was some sort of requirement to note each article you happened to read, that "web log" was to be taken literally, and the idea was to keep a log on the web of everything you read on the web. I don't know what it is about me that I tend to perceive requirements, rules, and restrictions in activities where there is no governing body and no mechanism of enforcement.

So why am I posting? I'm seeing that a lot of people are talking about it and thought you might want to talk about it too.

Here's Chait's conclusion to get you started:

Conservatives have crowed for years that they have "won the war of ideas." More often than not, such boasts include a citation of Richard Weaver's famous dictum, "Ideas have consequences." A war of ideas, though, is not an intellectual process; it is a political process. As my colleague Leon Wieseltier has written, "[I]f you are chiefly interested in the consequences, then you are not chiefly interested in the ideas." The netroots, like most of the conservative movement, is interested in the consequences, not the ideas. The battle is being joined at last.