Quantifying the value of time spent blogging or commenting

Not on our site, but on political blogging sites. There is truly some useful content out there, and interesting points of views, I just wonder about the value of the time spent commenting on blogs. I caught the story about the Edwards Coulter exchange on Hardball yesterday and then saw a post about it on The Caucuses. There are 108 comments. Basically taking 1 of three views (well I only sampled about 9% of them ;-). I wonder if it probably would have been more valuable to either “side” (pro Edwards or anti-Edwards people) to have made a phone call, or talked to a friend about the candidate?