AUSTIN – As 2,000 liberal bloggers at the Netroots Nation convention downtown happily cruised through their Friday trumpeting lefty causes and bashing big media, a starkly different scene was unfolding across town.

In a tony hotel on the north side of town, several hundred conservatives at the "Defending the American Dream Summit" conference spent their day bashing the liberals and reluctantly trumpeting their counterparts' online successes.

For example, MoveOn.org's effective online movement – the mere mention of which made lips curl in a panel called "New Media and the Conservative Movement."

"All of you who are allergic to liberalism," said Ralph Benko, a Washington political consultant and author of an upcoming book on the conservative movement online, "hold your noses and go to their site."

As much as the right loves to hate the liberal nonprofit giant, the panelist and others admitted MoveOn has figured out how to use the Internet for quick, massive mobility.

And the conservatives' convention this weekend, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity and RightOnline.com, focused on a burning desire to take their grass-roots activism – an area where they have slaughtered the left – and turn it into an effective online campaign for their cause.

Meanwhile, in the convention center, the liberal Netroots group was trying to do the opposite: Take online successes and turn them into wins at the polls.

Bloggers were trained on how to recruit volunteers and talk to the media, how to get their message out through film and radio, and how to send care packages to the soldiers.

The conservatives learned how to "micro-blog" – minute-by-minute updates on sites like Twitter – and were schooled in the latest developments of YouTube and Yahoo! Live.

The exhibit hall at the RightOnline show had taxpayer advocacy groups. The liberals had a guy playing a guitar singing protest songs.

Perhaps the best people to describe the different worlds going on in Austin this week were the conferencegoers.

"The people here have brains," said Netroots-goer Rachel Farris, an Austin blogger aptly named "Mean Rachel."

Across town, Gail Suttle of Austin said she figured they were probably talking about similar things – winning for their causes.

"But they might be learning more devious ways to do it," she said.