There is ample evidence to suggest that the Internet has greatly influenced the Ron Paul for president campaign.

But what about the opposite — has Ron Paul influenced the Internet?

For wise insight, we asked Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times’ “Top of the Ticket” blog to share his Ron Paul experience — as a blogger and as a seasoned political observer.  Here is Andrew’s frontline report:

The story of Ron Paul’s campaign, especially the fundraising success and attraction of thousands of supporters, is one of the best of the ‘08 campaign. So we’ve tried to come at it from several different angles, doing blog items on various fundraising successes, the growth of his meet-up groups, and even an item examining some of the several hundred comments that another item had elicited.

Ron Paulites or Paulunteers as we now call them are passionate about their candidate. Within minutes of an item posting, they are leaving comments and this can go on for a day or two, several hundred total. In the beginning many were crude or obscene, but at the urging of fellow supporters they seem to have mellowed in recent weeks.

A Paul item like “Ron Paul supporters DO NOT READ THIS! Please!”  can attract more than 60,000 readers in a day. I think our record was 500 comments.

This puts Ron Paul items among the biggest draws, although we’ve done items on other candidates that have drawn several hundred thousand hits. Other big draws include Hillary Clinton, Larry Craig and Oprah. But no one draws comments like Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is the only candidate we list by name in our blogroll, so people can search for the many items we’ve done on him. Much of the comments, I must say, are very negative. They object to the lack of coverage of their candidate and then when they get coverage they object to the smallest and largest details.

I’ve taken to adding replies to many comments to get a dialogue going and it’s really quite fun. They denounce the msm newspapers as outdated and dying and then complain when they learn that blog items do not appear in that allegedly outdated institution but only online. So we go back and forth and have a real dialogue and learn more about each other. It’s quite time-consuming. Some express amazement that someone actually reads and replies, but I enjoy it.

We did receive some appreciation when late on one Sunday night we did an item about his breaking the one-day online fundraising record and getting more than $6 million.

As we’ve done with other candidates, one day we even took  an entire page from Paul’s website and ran an item In His Own Words: Ron Paul.

But other items which appear to dis Dr. Paul or sound sarcastic get far more reaction. And they forget the previous items that pleased them.

Ron Paul supporters also appear not to read items about other candidates because they often ask why we don’t write sarcastic or negative items on them when we do. We try to be an equal opportunity offender.