Netroots is a term coined in 2002 by Jerome Armstrong[1] to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services.
Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi credits the short lived success of his then-client Howard Dean to their listening and taking the lead from netroots activity.
[citation needed] James Webb had, in fact, been the subject of a successful netroots draft, which resulted in his entry into the Virginia senate race.
Netroots activists also supported Ned Lamont in his 2006 primary victory over Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, wrote Ari Melber in The Nation magazine.
[7] In a December 2005 interview with Newsweek magazine,[8] Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos, described the netroots as "the crazy political junkies that hang out in blogs."
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.
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[ell]" 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.'" ...
Popularizer of the term—unaware of the obscure, earlier citation when he used it—was the aforementioned (great old word) Armstrong on his blog, MyDD, on Dec. 18, 2002, as he went to work on the presidential campaign of Gov.