The 2008 US Presidential election has seen Nate Silver become a media personality with his fivethirtyeight.com website which became the psephology site of record during the campaign and election. Ironically its popularity on election night was more than blogger could handle and it locked. Sites like dailykos expend exorbitant engineering costs and effort to make sure their sites can handle the peak load of an election night, I suspect fivethirtyeight will not make the same mistake.
The popularity of Nate Silver mimics the experience of the Australian psephologists during the recent Australian national elections. With Bryan Palmer's Ozpolitics, the Poll Bludger (William Bowe) and Possum Pollytics becoming the sites for all Australian psephology's needs.
It is a quirk of the citizen journalism genre that independent citizen psephologists would be trusted over the opinion makers of the mass media. I suspect because psephology and polling offers some level of certainty through empiricism. But also because the newspapers and other political media usually approach a poll result as an excuse to publish an article of, "Why this poll means you should support my politics".
