With 3.5 million unique visitors every week, his blog has become the preeminent site for liberals on the Web. It's also a virtual political action committee. Daily Kos raised more than $1 million for Democratic candidates in 2004. Senate minority leader Harry Reid was a keynote speaker for the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas last June, and potential 2008 presidential candidate Mark Warner feted attendees with a $50,000 gala at the Stratosphere Casino. When John Kerry and Barack Obama wanted a line to the blogosphere's most reliable partisans, they posted on Kos.Daily Kos works because it's not a one-way broadcast of Moulitsas' views. Close to 99 percent of the site is user-generated – it hosts 14,000 comments a day and 2,000 miniblogs called diaries. Moulitsas has figured out how to turn readers into writers, to transform discontent into content.
An activist who has succeeded in mobilizing so many passionate users might next head for a career inside the political machine. Run for office. Start a PAC. Become a consultant. But no. At what's arguably the top of his game, Moulitsas says he's "going offline" next year, taking his obvious knack for building online communities and applying it to that other great American pastime: sports. And once he gets his network of sports blogs ramped up, he'll turn to building communities in the real world, a chain of giant meeting places "replicating megachurches for the left" – complete with cafés and child care. Moulitsas has shown he can harness people's enthusiasm, but he says he doesn't want a leadership role in these "democracy centers."
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