If you are a blogger who is looking into making money out of your online publishing, there are a number of blogs you ought to read on a daily basis, one of them being TechCrunch. There's much to learn from Michael Arrington's blog, especially if you were brought up to believe that an Arts & Science education was better without having a couple of business courses under your belt. Boy ... do I have regrets.

Anyhow, yesterday Michael posted a bit about a new commercial project going beta, Political Base. Here's a bit of what Arrington had to say :

The site, which focuses on local, state and national elections and other political matters, is timed perfectly to take advantage of the 2008 presidential elections and the estimated $4.5 billion that will be spent on advertising to promote candidates and issues.

PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can’t change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can’t be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site’s community the ability to create and edit content.

I wondered aloud at a TechPresident meeting if this signals that political blog properties are viable business opportunities after all.

Jupiter Research just released this morning a study titled Politics on the Net : Reaching Audiences That Matter, and it's a bit of good news for political blogs like this one, which have seen a sginificant decline in ad revenue.

The good news? Here ya got them :

Key Finding
Active voters are slightly less likely than are overall online users to participate in social networks, but they utilize this medium nonetheless. However, their usage suggests that politically oriented and news-oriented blogs and comment sites would be the best choice for political organizing and advertising.

What do you know? Political blogs are indeed better at targetting political advertising ... duh!