Hack Attack.(The Talk of the Town)(hacking online communities)

Late last Tuesday night, Pam Spaulding tried to post an entry on her blog, Pam's House Blend, from her home in Durham, North Carolina. There was a technical glitch, and she couldn't publish her post. To find the source of the problem, Spaulding decided to go to the Web site for SoapBlox, a small company in Denver that administers the sites for more than a hundred liberal blogs around the country, including Pam's House Blend, which focusses on gay and lesbian issues. There the evidence of hacking was obvious: SoapBlox.net had been redesigned, with a logo of a hand and a message that said "destroying online communities." Spaulding tried to reach the owner and sole employee of SoapBlox, Paul Preston, but he was already overwhelmed by similar complaints from blogs around the country. "When I woke up on Wednesday," Preston said, "I started checking my phone and e-mail, and people were like, 'Oh my God!' "

Almost accidentally, Preston had come to control a critical crossroads in the netroots nation: the informal community of progressive bloggers and online activists who now play an important role in Democratic Party politics. In 2003, after Preston graduated from Ohio State, he started posting comments about Howard Dean's Presidential campaign on Daily Kos, the pioneering liberal blog founded by Markos Moulitsas. "The great thing about Kos is that the software made it easy for lots of people to join in," Preston said. "I thought it would be a good idea to reverse engineer it--to write software that would allow other people to create blogs that could work the same way."

Preston moved to Denver after the 2004 elections, to take a job in Web-site development, and, as a sideline, started SoapBlox. From the beginning, he charged modest prices--which now range from fifteen to forty dollars a month. "I never did a single advertisement, but the thing just took off," he said.

The experience of Dean Barker, a co-founder and the managing editor of Blue Hampshire, a blog devoted to Democratic politics in ...