I’m going to be watching Hillary Clinton’s first live webcast at 4 p.m., not because I think there are going to be any earthshaking exchanges between her and the online public, but because I’m interested in how someone with as much campaign cash as Hillary uses the web (and because I’m particularly interested in how Hillary deals with the liberal netroots as she tries to secure the Democratic nomination).

From where I sit, the liberal netroots seem to be far more predisposed to “underdog” candidates like Obama and Edwards, and distrustful of (if not downright hostile toward) establishment Democrats like Hillary. It’s about Hillary’s slowness to repudiate her vote in favor of the Iraq War, sure, but it’s also an insider-outsider thing. The Clintons, and their advisers, are the consummate Democratic insiders, the people behind those proverbial gates that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of DailyKos, wants to be crashing.

It’s worth noting, then, that today DailyKos, along with just about every major liberal political blog in the country (as well as the local blog Horsesass) is boasting an ad, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, promoting her series of webcasts. This shows two things. One, that Hillary’s campaign knows how to get the attention of a sprawling medium with a still-uncertain business model: by using cash. And two, that Hillary’s campaign is wary enough about the likelihood of either buying off, or winning over, the netroots that it is willing to go around them — is willing to pay for ads that drive the considerable traffic of the liberal blogosphere over to her own web site, where she can speak directly, unfiltered, to the netroots (and collect email addresses that will allow her to continue speaking directly to these people throughout her campaign).

It’ll be interesting to see how this strategy plays out.