Presidential Blogging: Dos & Don’ts

3:39 pm EST April 5th, 2007 | News | 2 Comments

How not to do it: Joe Biden’s blog is press release land. It’s all about the nitty gritty mechanics that get people inside D.C. excited but nobody in the real world.

How to do it: Barack Obama’s blog recently added Nation writer Sam Graham-Felsen and it’s the first blog of the ’08 season that reads like what we loved so much about the Dean blog. Real stories from real people and an actual back-and-forth exchange of content.

Room for improvement: Sen. Clinton’s blog is trying to be personal but still comes off too antiseptic, while the Edwards blog is quite literally all over the place. Focus, people.

Strangely none of the “top tier” Republican candidates have blogs.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH Biden is putting Youtube to good use.

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2 Responses to “Presidential Blogging: Dos & Don’ts”

  1. Janus Daniels says:
    April 5, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    Making the connection:
    “Real stories from real people and an actual back-and-forth exchange… Strangely none of the “top tier” Republican candidates have blogs.”
    Not so strange.

  2. Benny says:
    April 6, 2007 at 11:04 pm

    OW, I remember something you did awhile back that caused me to post something on my blog: I called it Tribe Blogocracy.

    It was about when you asked your readers whether to keep Snap or not. Most of us told you to ditch it, and you did. I thought it was great because you asked and got an answer, and followed through. It’s something I cannot really do on my blog because blogger has limitations in what I can or cannot do if one lacks the expertise, expertise in your case, you possess.

    In the case of Edwards’ blog, it really is a tribe blogocracy to the max. My issue with it is that while folks can post diaries all they want, some of the features get overlooked, and they frustrate the readers and supporters. It tries to be a Daily Kos in a way, except there is no restriction on how many diaries wants to log. The Edwards’ strongly believe that voices can be heard and should be heard instead of the highly controlled, and yes I will say, contrived Obama and Clinton blogs. Edwards used to do his blog that way in 2004. Today, I consider it a bit old school, given that Facebook and social networking tools are messy as the rest of them, and that includes Edwards’ blog.

    The round-ups are helpful and Edwards encourages citizen journalism, whereby someone vlog or plogs an event and enters it as a diary. Edwards often invites bloggers to press conferences and allows them to ask questions. I may be wrong, but I don’t think other candidates allow such access.

    So to me, tribal(yes, I am using plural) blogocracy rocks, and it is the best type of democracy: from the groundroots/netroots upward.