"You can hear the netroots screaming," wrote Michael Barone in his generally conservative opinion blog on the US News Web site, putting into context a portion of a poll hailed by bloggers doubting the wisdom of going into Iraq.

On the other side of the political divide, the Nation's Web site cited the unabashedly liberal Jerome Armstrong's praise of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee "for reading blogs and being ready to work with the netroots."

From these citations and a few of the million and a half others in a Google search, the word netroots has a left-of-center connotation. The earliest use I can find is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on an e-mail list of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from an "rmcdon" at the University of California at San Diego, apparently complaining about an internal shake-up: "Too bad there's no netroots organization that can demand more than keyboard accountability from those who claim to be acting on behalf of the 'greater good.'" (Lesson: Anything you crank out on a computer can come back to haunt you centuries later.)