Party time in Beantown

Gone is the yellow shirt. This week's colors are red, white and blue--just look at all those balloons suspended in midair at Boston's FleetCenter.

As the Democratic National Convention gathers momentum heading toward John Kerry's presidential nominee acceptance speech Thursday night, the supply of news from and about the big Boston pep rally seems nearly bottomless. If you can't get enough but need some help keeping it all straight, media types old and new are all too glad to pitch in.

Boston is that rarity these days--a two-newspaper town, and the locals are weighing in with word on everything from convention security to gridlock on the local roads. The more buttoned-down Boston Globe offers a wealth of stories and links far and wide, while the more rip-roaring Boston Herald plays it straight and fairly narrow. The slick monthly Boston magazine offers its share of political insight but is also "the" place to turn to if you're tracking Red Sox devotee Ben Affleck and the party scene.

The Globe has a resident Web logger, and he's hardly alone at the convention. The New York Times on Monday reported on some three dozen bloggers who got press credentials to cover the event and, as one put it, do something they don't usually do: talk to "primary sources." The American Press Institute has set up CyberJournalist.net as a full-service stop for your fill of convention blogs and online journalism in general.

And then there's Technorati, which bills itself as "the authority on what's going on in the world of Web logs"--a search engine that says it tracks more than 3 million blogs. Besides reports from Boston, it points to blogs both liberal (on the left side of the page, of course) and conservative (on the right).