One on one
: Britain’s Hansard Society studies weblogs but goes about it in a wacky way: assigning eight jurors to judge eight blogs. Too small on both ends. This isn’t a trend; this is a random exercise in chance. For what it’s worth, some of their conclusions:
: Blogging has the potential to significantly impact on political engagement and political processes as they provide an opportunity for alternative informal voices to enter into the political debate without a great deal of cost or effort.
: Blogging breaks down the barriers between public and privates spaces and allows elected representatives to put across their individuality and personality.
: The availability of low-cost, low maintenance authoring software means blogs are far easier to construct and update than conventional websites.
: The most appealing blogs are those which provide genuine debate between bloggers and visitors to the blog. Blogs that do not offer this facility give visitors little reason to return.
: At the moment, political blogging is still regarded as the pursuit of internet connoisseurs rather than ordinary members of the public. While our jury found blogs easy to navigate, they found the tone of content unappealing.
: Blogging has the potential to be of enormous benefit to MPs and other elected representatives who use it as a listening post rather than another tool to broadcast their ideas, achievements or party dogma.
The Guardian found the negatives in the report, among them that some posts could get long and boring. So I’ll end this post now.
