I mentioned in my last post that Iain Dale’s guide to political blogging will almost certainly point you to a blog or two which you didn’t know about before. I’m thinking specifically of the blog by the UK’s minister for e-government, Pat McFadden.
Before you rush over there, be prepared for a disappointment. It started in July 2006, a few weeks after McFadden took on the e-gov brief. There have been six postings since, on a weekly(ish) basis with long gaps. It looks like an extension to the site’s barebones CGI-driven CMS, rather than any recognisable blogging tool. There’s no comment function, no permalinks, no RSS.
The content is purely constituency-centric, and even then, it reads more like the ‘MP’s Diary’ column you typically see in the local paper. In fact, one wonders how seriously he is taking his e-government duties: his biography makes no reference to the portfolio.
2 thoughts on “E-gov minister's non-blog”
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Lots of Politicians decide to get into this whole ‘blog thing’, and set up their own blog. How, though, do they expect to have a conversation with the electorate when they don’t participate in other blogs or, as in Pat McFadden’s case, allow comments on their own?
As e-Government minister, he should be the one who understands blogs and their potential, not only from the point of view of improving his own party’s popularity, but more importantly as a new avenue of Government communication which if used properly could stem the tide of falling turnout and help people form opinions and then express them.
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