I found the following very interesting article on ABC News Online. The core of the article is the results of an Associated Press, AOL poll.

The number of people who go online for political news is rising, with more than one-third saying they check the Internet for such information.

This group is more likely to be younger, better educated and male than the population in general, an Associated Press-AOL News poll found.

While 35 percent say they check the Internet for political updates about campaigns and candidates, that number grows to 43 percent of likely voters and they tend to be more liberal than conservative.

Think about that a minuet – the implications are staggering. Just under 50 percent of likely voters use the Internet to educate themselves about politics, political campaigns, and candidates. Less shocking, especially for anyone maintaining a conservative presence on the Internet, is that the Internet is more liberal than conservative – though there are no numbers provided to tell us how much more.

If, as the poll suggests that 43% of likely voters are in a mostly liberal category – dose that point to the fact that the likely voters are no representative of the US population as a whole? I tackled the whole right and left statistics previously in this post, which is made more interesting by the ABC article.

More interesting information from the poll:

four in 10 men search the Web for political news, compared with three in 10 women.

about four in 10 of those under age 50 search the Web for political news, compared with fewer than two in 10 of those 65 and over.

more than half of those with college degrees look to the Web for politics, compared with one-third of those who have some college, and fewer than one in six with a high school education or less.

Here is something the chew on:

Seven in 10 said such sites run by news organizations are the most trustworthy

Even the news outlets can admit they are biased, to bad the vast majority of the people don’t realize this fact. That means that 70% of the population takes the man stream media as honest and complete its portrayal of the news. Scary, that.

Another interesting tidbit for my fell members of the blogosphere:

For all the noise made by the political bloggers, a relatively small slice of the population is contributing to the blogs, an online journal or newsletter, and chats.

Only one in 10 of those who browse online for politics participate in the blogs though more than twice that many check them out.

Interesting read, you can find the entire article here.