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(Image via Lori Lipsman of afamousartist.com)

When I started in Washington journalism at National Journal in 1997, we reporters were still getting press releases from Congress by fax. Reports from think tanks arrived in the mail; searching through lobbying disclosure documents required trips to either the Senate or an ornate building on New York Avenue; and Google was this nifty new search engine people were adopting to navigate the web on their Netscape browsers, instead of using Lycos or AltaVista.

A lot has changed over the past decade, thanks to a technological revolution that shows no signs of slowing down.

Readers of this blog know those changes intimately, and how exciting they have been. The movement from static websites to interactive ones. The growth of stand-alone online media outlets. The development of blogging technology. The rise of the political blogosphere. The maturation of that ’sphere and differentiation into journalistic and activist wings. The incorporation of the new technologies into political campaigns. The long-awaited arrival of online video as a medium. And the transformation of the newspaper — and news cycle — in America.

In the last two years there’s been another exciting wave of online development, as some of America’s oldest publications have adopted and adapted to the blogging part of the technological revolution, leading to the birth of something I’ve come to think of as the mainstream blogosphere (the MSB).

The New York Times today has 51 blogs. The Washington Post has more than 100. The Atlantic has developed a stable of bloggers, drawing on writers from The Economist, The American Prospect, and National Journal’s Hotline, as well as their existing staff. Time.com hired former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox and now is increasingly moving in the direction of web video; today’s hire of Salon’s Mike Scherer, who has done a fun series of political videos over the past year using VideoDog, only underscores the point. Bloggingheads.tv has gone big-time, and is now sometimes featured on the homepage of The New York Times, as well as regularly on the Opinion page. Video magazine Slate V has debuted and quickly become an online success. And reporters like Dan Balz and Adam Nagourney are now blogging regularly, at The Trail and The Caucus, respectively.

All of this is a long way of introducing the fact that as of Monday, I’ll be leaving The Prospect and this blog behind, to join that MSB on its continuing technological journey, in a joint position for The Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com, a part of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, as a national web politics editor/producer.

Writing and building this blog has taught me so much about online space, and been so much fun. Thank you all for reading. And stay in touch.