Early in the morning on the day after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first legislative setback, I woke up, made a pot of coffee and stumbled to my laptop in the kitchen. Bleary-eyed after a late night at the Capitol, I banged out a short blurb and posted it on my Weblog, The California Insider. The governor, who a few days earlier had vowed that "failure was no option," had indeed failed. I linked from my blog to The Sacramento Bee's story on the legislative debate and vote and promised to comment in more detail later in the day. Then, in a nod to our physically fit new chief executive, I abandoned the keyboard for the exercise bike to try to work off some of the extra pounds I'd added during the recall campaign.

Suddenly, the phone rang.

It was a Los Angeles news radio station, wondering if I could go live to discuss the Legislature's rejection of Schwarzenegger's budget proposals. The radio jocks had been monitoring my blog that morning and noticed the item I'd posted minutes before. Would I share my commentary with their listeners?

Such is the life of the journalist-blogger -- the always-on, 24-7 news and information machine. We are the few, the hearty, the counterrevolutionaries, invading a Web-based world that was created as an alternative to the mass media of which we are still a part. Although few believe at this stage that the blogosphere is a serious threat to the print world, we refuse to let the challenge go without a fight. We think we might even have something to learn from our amateur brethren.

"I am either a pioneer working on the cutting edge of journalism or a fool wasting my time in chit-chat with a tiny and ultimately insignificant number of readers."

Thousands of blogs clutter the Internet, but only a tiny handful are published by full-time print journalists. Mine is the only one I know of written by a political columnist for a major newspaper. I am either a pioneer working on the cutting edge of journalism or a fool wasting my time in chit-chat with a tiny and ultimately insignificant number of readers. No one really knows.

Which is part of what makes it so much fun.

Expectations for j-bloggers are not only low, they don't exist. My blog is a sidelight, a hobby, an experiment. It can be one thing one day and another the next. It veers from short, gossipy political tidbits to long and serious discourses on proposed state spending limits. I can scoop other print journalists, even my own print column, so I can never really be beat, because only I decide what goes on my page. Like most blogs, it is whatever is on my mind at the moment. Except that, unlike most bloggers, I actually get paid to tell people what I think.

My blog evolved from my own journalistic primordial soup: two growing stacks of paper on my cluttered desk in the Bee's editorial board offices in downtown Sacramento. One stack was a collection of e-mails from readers that I'd printed out and saved, for what I did not know. The other was a pile of notes, press releases and government reports that I'd deemed worth keeping even if they hadn't risen to the level of being worth a column by themselves.

One day I realized that I could wed these two mounds to produce something new: my own electronic newsletter about California politics and public policy. I wanted to keep in touch with the people who'd taken the time to write to me. And I had all this stuff left over from my reporting that never made it into print. So I started compiling the items into a newsletter and sending it out to my correspondents while inviting other readers of my column to subscribe as well. That newsletter eventually became my blog.

Unlike my column, which I strive to make accessible to a broad audience, the blog was aimed from the beginning at the narrow band of readers with a high level of interest in California politics. I figured my readership would be mainly legislators and their staffs, executive branch employees, lobbyists, political consultants, fellow journalists and, among the general public, political junkies.

As it happened, the blog was born in early April, 2003, just as the nascent movement to recall California Gov. Gray Davis was getting underway. It became the perfect marriage of medium and message.

The historic recall, even before Schwarzenegger's entry into the race, attracted intense interest from a group of readers eager for every detail as soon as it was available. The blog provided it. Whether it was my own reporting or news releases, campaign finance reports or links to other publications, I tried to feed my readers as much information and analysis about the recall as I could find or generate.

Using commercial software licensed by our IT crew for a couple hundred dollars, I posted items from my desk at work, from home, from my laptop at campaign rallies and debates, even from a PDA equipped with a connection to the wireless Web. Before long, with the help of a few notices and links from bloggers with national audiences, The California Insider was creating a buzz, and attracting thousands of visitors a day. Several times during the campaign my blog finished the day as the most visited site at sacbee.com -- the Bee's online outlet.

The blog and the column began to feed off each other. I would post short items on the blog, get feedback, update them, then polish them up and turn them into columns for the print version of the paper. Readers of the blog, in effect, were able to look over my shoulder as I drafted my columns.

And they responded. E-mail and telephone traffic picked up considerably, and sources in and around the Capitol began dropping far more tips, analysis and suggestions on me than they had when the print column was my only forum. Readers loved the immediacy of it. Several wrote to tell me that it was the first place they went on the Web every morning and the last place they checked at night before they went to sleep.

When, at one point, the secretary of state balked at counting the recall petition signatures in a timely manner, someone tipped me to the decision. I confirmed it and reported it on the blog, along with a citation of the law he appeared to be circumventing. Within minutes the recall proponents had copied my blog item, distributed it to their own e-mail list and begun inundating the hapless official with messages demanding that he follow the law.

The best moments for the blog came from my travels with the Schwarzenegger campaign. My post from his August rally in Huntington Beach was the first published account of the madness that would surround him whenever the candidate ventured out into the public.

Another time on the campaign trail, I tape-recorded Schwarzenegger consultant Mike Murphy giving his spin to the press corps, then a few minutes later stumbled onto a voter who had happened by the scene. I got his take on the campaign at that stage, transcribed both interviews and posted them on the site. Most readers thought that the voter, not the spinmeister, made the most sense.

And when, near the end of the campaign, the press mob descended on a woman they believed had come to a Schwarzenegger rally in Modesto to confront him about a past abuse, I reported the scene in a richly detailed account that attracted nationwide attention.

But if journalism is the first draft of history, my blog was the notepad that leads to that draft. And the result wasn't always pretty. Once, in the run-up to Schwarzenegger's will-he-or-won't-he announcement on the Jay Leno show, a source close to the actor told me that Arnold's team had been told to schedule a press conference to announce that he would not run. I posted the item, but the conference was cancelled, and Schwarzenegger, of course, eventually did run. While newspapers the next day reported the on-again off-again nature of the decision and the press conference, they did so after the fact. My real-time reporting, while correct at the moment I posted it, ended up being wrong by the end of the day.

This sort of growing pain irritated the Bee's news staff, which was justifiably worried that my speculative posts would reflect poorly on their work. They already were none-too-thrilled with my policy of linking to stories from other papers, which in their eyes represented my telling our readers that the Bee was not the sole source of all great things journalistic. Then I took on Cruz Bustamante.

In an early September post, I suggested that the state's lieutenant governor and the leading Democratic candidate to replace Davis was not the sharpest tool in the Capitol shed. Bustamante, I said, would never have become Assembly speaker had he not been Latino, but instead would have finished out his term as an anonymous back-bencher. That and a parallel slap at the Legislature's Latino Caucus got the blood boiling again in the Bee's newsroom, where several reporters demanded that my blog be edited. Until then, I had posted my items directly to the Web, while sending a copy to my editor to back read.

My editors agreed that I should be subject to pre-publication review, and the policy was quietly implemented. About 10 days later, however, the paper's ombudsman announced it to the world, garbling some of the details in the process. His column set off a furor in the blogosphere, prompting articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and a "Free Dan Weintraub" movement on the Net, where my blogging peers demanded that I be unmuzzled.

While the attention was flattering, in reality there never was a muzzle. My editors at the Bee's editorial board -- not those in the newsroom who had complained -- were still the ones clearing my posts, and they changed next to nothing. The editing process did slow down my posting rate a bit, making it awkward to work late at night or on weekends, but it had little or no effect on the substance of the site.

Since the election, both my posting rate and my readership have declined, as emotions have cooled and the political pace around Sacramento has returned to something of a more normal routine. But the blog continues, chronicling first Schwarzenegger's transition to governor and now his young administration. I've slowly transformed the site back to what I originally intended: a place to post an item or two a day, engage in conversation about my print columns and offer items and analysis that aren't quite ready for prime time.

I highly recommend the form to print journalists trying to connect to the online world and the online audience. J-blogs probably work best when focused on a narrow beat: the state Capitol, city hall, a local sports team. But there's no limit to what you can do with them, and that's the beauty of the genre. It's still so new that no one has defined what is the right way or the wrong way to do it. The field is wide open.