This is what I’m talking about. Via Loic is news that Nicolas Sarkozy’s right wing party UMP is giving away Tyepad blogs to all members for a year and they will also provide training on how to blog. They also have an initiative for podcasting. Very clever.
The only Irish political party that seems to have a HQ approved blogging programme is Labour. (Who must really love my tough love attitude towards them. No coloured garments will be mentioned in this post.) Still, it seems to be in beta at the moment and it’s mostly councillors that are blogging but thank goodness they are genuine in their messages. There are a few other politicians from other parties who blog but I don’t think it is due to encouragement from the core. I have to say well done to them for their fresh thinking and reaching out to web users. Wouldn’t it be nice if a political party encouraged their members to blog by providing blog space?
It would be great of some blogging company had an Irish representative who’d set up the blogs for all these members. Or set up special blogs for this party so that the template would have links back to the party blogs on the sidebar. Anyone know of such a person? 🙂 Once the blogs are set up then it’s a matter of training. There are a few people training people to blog around the country. Why not have classes in various catchment areas. Hell, I’m happy to provide training to people in the Cork area if the party provides a space to do it.
What’s the selling point? Well, with all your members blogging it means the web is going to be awash with political opinion guided by your ideals. Because they’re blogs and they all have their own unique audiences it will have wider reach into a non-poltics obsessed audience. The key I guess is not to force all members to just discuss party issues. Blogs will encourage all members to share their opinion and put their thoughts down into written form, allowing them, in a sense, to polish up their own beliefs. It can also be a great way of fact-checking the opposition and guiding new party policies.
How far away are we in Ireland to see this happening or will it ever happen? Maybe it’ll be superceded by something else?
I’ll pass on the message to Matt 😉
TBH, I think blog writing is beyond the ability of many of our representatives but I’d like to be proven wrong. Maybe I should get in touch with our local TD, whoever he is, I can’t remember his name. He’s quite vocal and enthusiastic about sending letters to Bus Eireann and making a fuss when asked so he might have something to say!
Isn’t IT@Cork having a “How to blog” session soon?
Politics.ie will do it.
Why not copy and paste this entire blog item over to the submission form at activecitizen.ie and see what happens?
We run Blogsome and Blogs and have been able to integrate, for example, the Labour template into the blog – no hassle. If anyone’s interested I can show demo.