A Slight Modification
Yesterday in my blog I basically said that I wasn't so sure if blogging would be a good or bad idea for a Congressional representative to utilize on their Web sites. While I am still not sure of the answer I must make a slight modification to what I said.
When I considered what size of a population would take advantage of a Congressional blog, I downplayed the scope. Today I decided to take a look at the blog that Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) keeps, and was surprised (and impressed) to see the number of comments that his blog entries receive. While I was thinking that maybe a hundred people might respond, I was surprised to see that some entries had over 800 comments.
Yes, I still stand by my opinion that not everyone will read the blog and the comments might be slightly skewed to represent a small component of the constituency, but maybe blogs make sense. It might eventually become a great way to open up a forum and get the constituency talking, but for the Congressman or women's electoral sake, they should hope that what the constituents say is in their favor.
When I considered what size of a population would take advantage of a Congressional blog, I downplayed the scope. Today I decided to take a look at the blog that Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) keeps, and was surprised (and impressed) to see the number of comments that his blog entries receive. While I was thinking that maybe a hundred people might respond, I was surprised to see that some entries had over 800 comments.
Yes, I still stand by my opinion that not everyone will read the blog and the comments might be slightly skewed to represent a small component of the constituency, but maybe blogs make sense. It might eventually become a great way to open up a forum and get the constituency talking, but for the Congressman or women's electoral sake, they should hope that what the constituents say is in their favor.
1 Comments:
882 comments...highly interesting but also slightly scary. I certainly did not read all of the comments, but the ones I did read were all from one fellow named "Guest."
As that may indicate, one of the problems with this blog is that all the responces are annonymous.
We have certainly argued about the idea of anonymity in blogging, and no consensus has been reached as of yet, but I have to imagine that when it comes to a Congressional website it would be nice to see that these comments are coming from real consitituents and not just planted by political opponents, or even worse, their own staffers!
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