I think that is a very big part of it.

Another factor is that blogs tend to be post consumer news.
Rehashing, rewording and repeating the news in it's various forms.
Why bother with the niche market when he gets major market play and has a massive boots on the ground force?

I think that there is more danger than benefit to him at this point.
I am willing to bet that this dynamic will change come the GE.
After all, fanning the flames of inter-party rivalry is a bit counter productive. The liberal nature of the blogoshpere will be a lot more useful in a GE when "our team" winning is a unifying goal.

When a mere eight large corporations control the entirety of the U.S. broadcast media, blogging is NOT "simply another way of communicating."

For me, blogging is a form of insurrection. I can get out ideas that are usually squelched by the corporate news media - such as the idea that the U.S. manufacturing base has collapsed so badly we may not be able to achieve 20 percent wind energy by 2030.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/14/17722/3424/955/515691

Or the idea that if we are going to get really serious about changing economic paradigms, we better start thinking about military action against Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, and other corners of the British Empire.

And the blogs are where many stories originated, which took weeks or even months to appear in the corporate media. Go back and compare how much material there is on the financial crises before the bailout of Bear Stearns on the blogs compared to the MSM.

Obama's unwillingness to "reach out" to the blogs is another indication that his time in the Ivy League moved him from the radicalism of street organizing to the elitism of the ruling class. Already, there are signs that the "free trade" corporatists are falling over each other in their rush to get the Democratic Party to do their bidding:

Frustrated by Bush's failures, many in the business elite want to return to the softer empire of corporate globalization and, increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this return. As a measure of this - the capitalist equivalent of voting with their feet - political analyst Kevin Phillips notes in his new book, Bad Money, that, in 2007, "[h]edge fund employees' contributions to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee outnumbered those to its Republican rival by roughly nine to one".

doesn't reach out to the blogs and is systematically choking money off to independent, but democratic aligned organizations which he feels he doesn't need and/or can't control. Blogs is just one part of it (I've written about the other part, also.)

Actually, on blog calls with Clinton I didn't find they said what they thought you wanted to hear, as far as that goes. Quite the contrary. Not to say they never pander, they certainly do. But they never pandered to blogs, they just included them in the conversation.

And anyone who thinks Obama never panders, well, I've got this bridge, see, and it's very reasonably priced.

As for hubris, virtually every other campaign had bloggers on some of their calls, at least. And that makes sense, because bloggers have an audience. Not to mention, millions of people. You wouldn't cut off journalists with the exact same circulation, why bloggers? (Well I've told you why, and except for the fact that Obama is acting out his disdain for blogs, it has nothing to do with integrity, and everything to do with power and control.)

Obama had best win, because he's telling a lot of people (not just bloggers) "I don't need your help". And when you look at state rather than national polls, y'know what, he's currently losing to McCain. When you tell people to shove it, you don't need their help, failure is not an option.

Say what you will about Clinton, but I don't know anyone who thinks she'd be choking of money to independent small-d groups, or freezing out constituencies she doesn't control. The blogosphere went mostly Obama, but Clinton kept her outreach.

*shrug* I'll support Obama, of course, and tell folks to vote for him, and so on. So will every other prog-blog, even the hard-core Clintonistas. But he'd better win or he won't have a lot of friends to cushion him in his fall from grace.

ego is certainly involved. Blogging is ego centric by it's very nature.That aspect is very much a reason I enjoy reading blogs.
By regular folk for regular folk. These folk just happen to be more prolific and visibly opinionated than most of us.

The fact is that there are a lot of "special" bloggers out there who's take on things I really appreciate. Who's perspective gets me thinking more about subjects that are ignored, or briefly touched on in the MSM.

Ian is certainly one of these folk. For that matter, the Agonist has more than it's fair share of "special bloggers" Sean-Paul was a huge influence on my continued sanity through the early days of the Iraq Invasion.

Yes. Some of these writers are indeed important and special.
Blogs are a niche certainly. The medium is still very young but the influence continues to grow at an exponential pace.

Ian makes some good points. The influence of blogs may be fairly small compared to their potential but it would be short sighted to leave them out in the cold. I personally think that we will see more interaction from the Obama campaign in the coming months. To not do so would be a strategic error.

some reasons why prog-blogs didn't unite hard behind Edwards, and they have a lot to do with the Edwards campaign. Plenty of blame on both sides on that issue.

heard the exact same thing from other bloggers. This story is simply correct, no matter who it comes from.

And no, Obama does not deal with bloggers the same as everyone else. That is simply a fact, he virtually never, ever, communicates with them and on the rare occasion when his staff does it tends to be extraordinarily pro-forma.

I have dealt with the Edwards, Obama, Clinton and Dodd campaigns this cycle. I am familiar with the different styles, and Obama is simply the one who has the least outreach, to the point where it's not far different from having none.

McCain is, in fact, being more open than Obama. That doesn't mean what he's saying is good, just that he's more open.

As for Obama, this is a combination of strategy (top-down communications control, squeezing out anyone who might go off message) and personal disdain, which he has not concealed. It may well be the right strategy, I know many people who think it is, including bloggers. But right or wrong, it's what he's doing.

hasn't he a site of his own? if not, why not?

has most not been skeptical. Some will be, after Obama proves to them they should be.

offend you when he ignores the priorities of netroots.

If he were to charm or patronize us with phone call conferences .. that still wouldn't make him a progressive and we'd still complain about that. Him communicating with "us" doesn't necessitate any successful degree of lobbying on our part.

deliberately refusing to see the point. Not talking to people is a sign of what you think about them and what you think about their priorities.

1) He will leave a significant residual force in Iraq.
2) He will not enact universal healthcare of any variety
3) He will not hold anybody responsible for what happened, but will push everything under the rug for "healing".
4) His economic policies will be essentially neoliberal, at best.

He'll be good on some things:

1) Open government (well, relatively open, compared to Bush)
2) Telecom policy

... he has actually stated a position on that, yes. I agree with the list generally but, I wonder if he would derail Congressional attempts to hold people accountable.

This an area I think the Netroots should push for as long as it takes. It's not something he can easily brush aside with the crimes being so egregious.