This is probably a little too “inside blog baseball” for the casual blog reader, but according to Ace the Edwards campaign has fired two liberal bloggers it hired after some of their more...colorful...postings came to light.

The thing is that this is likely to lead to a lot of retaliatory scrutiny of bloggers hired by Republican politicians from the left-wing blogs, and I can’t imagine that those bloggers are looking forward to it.  Given the often off-the-cuff or whimsical nature of blogging I’d posit that most bloggers, on both sides of the political spectrum, have written things that could easily be misconstrued when taken out of context.  Or are perhaps a little too “blue” for mainstream political audiences.

From now on I suspect that any blogger hired by a politician is going to have his/her postings gone through with a fine tooth comb in order to find anything that might be even marginally offensive for the sake of embarrassing the politician who did the hiring.  Something that will probably have the end result of either serious political bloggers becoming a lot less “edgy” and a lot more staid like mainstream reporters, or political campaigns simply hiring people who know blogs and bloggers but maybe aren’t necessarily bloggers themselves.

Either way, what’s important to take away from this is that blogs are no longer inconsequential, mostly anonymous online forums any more.  People are paying attention to this stuff, and you can be held accountable for the things you write.