You cannot get away from reading about the influence of the Internet on politics.

Today's New York Post (article not posted on the nypost.com Web site as of this writing) ran an article titled "W's Wide Web May Zap Dean's E-Machine."

A reading of this article took me back to 1998 when the erstwhile Lycos CEO Bob Davis would periodically issue press releases making claims on how Lycos' traffic was now greater than Yahoo's traffic. Hardly a day went by in those days in which "traffic bragging" was not headlined in the business press.

Let's get back to the above-mentioned New York Post article. Writer Deborah Orin states: "Dean's Web site yesterday boasted of 564,000 Internet supporters, but the Bush-Cheney campaign says its e-mail list is 6 million - a 10-1 lead. That includes 400,000 who have signed up for an active role as team workers."

There is much more in this article with lots of claims from different political camps about Web traffic and related fundraising claims.

I know I wrote about this a few days ago, but it is hilarious to read these comments and not think about similar commercial claims a few years ago. The bottom line is that within a few months, Internet Web sites and traffic claims will no longer be newsworthy as such information will be relegated to the mundane.