Blogging the political

The Grand Committee Room in Westminster was bunged to the gills last night for the Vox Politics seminar on the political uses of blogging. It was less of a seminar than a public debate.

Technology?

Actually the technology doesn�t matter. Leading Journalist blogger Stephen Pollard bought his domain name and had it for a year before he did anything with it. Even Tom Watson, the UK�s first blogging MP said it was some time before he got it � it�s just a website where you can create and change the content quickly and easily. The software at Blogger is relatively simple to get something up and going in a short time. Where you go from there is up to the individual.

It�s about talking

The real challenge for MPs and others in political life wishing to get more fully involved in what the Cluetrain Manifesto calls a �powerful global conversation� may be the archive system. Tom Watson: �It is no longer possible to argue that black is white when everything you have written is online. It takes a leap of faith.� It’s also the conversations that arise that are the most valuable.

What�s the payoff?

Ideas mostly. Pollard uses his to get out story ideas that have not been taken up by editors. These often give rise to useful conversations with or on other blogs. Tom Watson hopes to use this year’s Blogathon event to push out policy themes and drive debate in the comments folder of his blog – some of which he hopes to bring into the policy making process inside government.

Influence of blogs

Former New York Times editor Howell Raines, and columnist Maureen Dowd found themselves severely blog-tested when some of the US bloggers turned their attention to sharp practices within the paper and quality of output. So far this has been a US phenomenon, but the watchdog role may be something that grows as blogging becomes more widespread on this side of the Atlantic. On a more postive note, dark horse presidential candidate Howard Dean has managed to raise $& million in funds and has used his blog to facilitate meetings of 61,000 of his supporters.

Democracy or politics?

James Crabtree was keen to emphasise the potential that blogs bring legitimacy to the political process. The opportunity for opening politics out to the scrutiny of wider publics. This does not mean they have a corresponding potential for democracy as such, but the conversations, particularly where they are capable of engaging the political and journalistic classes, have the potential to radicalise political debate.

Much of the debate hinged around the needs of the new MP bloggers, and the template being used was largely that of the highly successful mini-pundit model, currently driving the blogosphere in the US. There was less discussion of how the technology can be developed beyond that simple model into a more formal project like White Rose, that looks at Civil Liberties, or Daily Summit, a short term site set up to cover the Earth Summit last summer.

We’d welcome a more nuanced debate about how weblogs might be developed in future, rather than getting too caught up on what they have been used to do so far. But perhaps that’s a discussion for another day. In the meantime we await news of the first Irish politician blogger!

Other blog comment on the event, so far, from whodoyouworkfor, Mad Musings, Richard Allan MP, and comprehensive notes on all the speakers from Plastic Bag, with a promise of something later from Gavinsblog.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty