The new owner of liberal blog RI Future has revealed himself:

Hello everyone. I’m sure this didn’t come as a surprise to some of you. My name is Brian Hull and I am the new owner and editor of the RI Future blog.

I appreciate the advice and support that I received from Matt Jerzyk and Pat Crowley, and I thank them for all that they have done to create, maintain, and grow the blog to where it is today.

We're a bit late on this. But in case you missed it, Pat Crowley, owner of the liberal blog RI Future, has sold the site. From his blog yesterday:

RIFUTURE has been sold. After much consideration, and after receiving a substantial offer of purchase, I have decided to sell RIFUTURE. The sale creates an opportunity to pursue other state wide goals while still maintaining a voice in the progressive blogosphere.

Kudos to Jef and his crew at GC: PVD for a marked increase in posts on their blog, which focuses on, well, making Providence a greater city.

Jef is always all over lax snow and ice removal and other topics of note, like this:

If you had a difficult time navigating the icy streets this morning, imagine trying to do it with a bicycle.

With apologies to Lewis Carroll, WJAR-TV newsman Jim Taricani has a new arts-related blog, Arts Through the Looking Glass, on the Channel 10 Web site. It debuts today with a positive review of the new movie Defiance.

Besides being an investigative reporter and a staunch Yankees' loyalist, Jim is a cultured guy who still plays a little guitar and has dabbled with a few screenplays.

As I've written before, it's great that blogs such as Hard Deadlines and Rhode Island's 12th have sprung up to cover areas that tend to get short-shrift from the Prov-centric RI media. And last Sunday, during his appearance on Newsmakers, Matt was fairly optimistic that bloggers will continue to focus more closely on municipal politics.

Asked how he sees his role as a blogger, Justin Katz, administrator of Anchor Rising, described a general feeling of treading the line between intellectual and comedian. He made the remark -- to which I can relate -- during a taping this morning of WPRI/WNAC-TV's Newsmakers.

We were joined by Matt Jerzyk, the creator of RI's Future, as part of a discussion about old and new media.

As we now know, Pat Crowley is taking on the reins at RI's Future from Matt Jerzyk. I talked with these two for a Q+A in this week's Phoenix:

Jerzyk's choice of a successor (for undisclosed terms) makes good sense, on a number of levels. The two men share a common grounding in community- and union-organizing. They are unapologetic liberals who each have a good nose for real news (Crowley has demonstrated this, for example, with posts, which received subsequent ProJo attention, about how Governor Carcieri and his wife owed back taxes on a vacation property, and about how a putative new reform group, TransformRI, was linked to Carcieri supporters).

Come and find out tonight (6-9) at the Wild Colonial, to celebrate Matt Jerzyk and to learn who will be the new owner* of RI's Future.

Matt, who's planning to focus on his legal career, deserves a lot of credit for building the blogosphere and for promoting the cause of participatory alternative media in Rhode Island.

Could it be a matter of time before Rhode Island becomes home to a solely Web-based news organization that carries on the mission of print newspapers?

Blogs such as RI's Future and Anchor Rising (and your humble blogger) cover some of this territory. These blogs certainly break news, develop research, offer viewpoints, and the first two of these sites benefit from their use of a group of animated contributors.

Earlier this year, in a story on the RI blogosphere, I broke the news that my friend Matt Jerzyk plans to sell his groundbreaking blog, Rhode Island's Future.

The details remain to be revealed, but Matt now says he has an agreement in place.

What does Matt have to say about his future?

The last few months have really been a crossroads for me.

Last week, as many Americans were celebrating the victory of Barack Obama, Heather Klink and a group of her classmates at Roger Williams University staged a vigil to protest the continued imprisonment of the Egyptian blogger known as Kareem Amer.

Klink, a senior, says she learned about Amer's case after taking PEN, a class taught by novelist Adam Braver in which students discuss the plight of imprisoned writers.

Kos today takes some justifiable pride in the accuracy of his own presidential forecast:

R2K Actual

Presidential vote: 51-46 52.6-46.1
Congressional vote: D+9 D+8.38

As much as people complained that R2K was too Obama-friendly, turned out it wasn't Obama friendly enough. It got McCain's total while undercounting Obama's support.

I was going to include Nate Silver's name in the headline for this post, but he's better known by his Web site, FiveThirtyEight.com, which -- with good reason -- has become a sensation this campaign season.

Here (h/t Romenesko) is part of the backstory:

Political commentary on the Internet is nothing new these days.