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House Speaker Starts Blog (Yawn...)

Micah L. Sifry | October 27, 2005 - 2:14pm | 5 comments | Email This!

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has a blog. Now, if only he had a personality.

It's nice to see politicians dipping their pinky toes into the blogosphere, I guess. And Hastert (or, more likely, his ghostwriter) does try to show that he gets it. He writes, "The internet is changing the way we share information. My office has been talking a lot about some of the conversations going on in blogosphere. So I thought, hey, I should start one and give you unfiltered updates on Capitol Hill."

But for this politician, "sharing information" really just means "a new way for us to get our message out."

As my friend David Weinberger once memorably shouted,"I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from 'message.' It is advertising. I want to avoid advertising!"

Speaker Hastert's spokesman, Ron Bonjean, seems equally clueless about the blogosphere. "Blogging is the new talk radio," he told the Christian Science Monitor. "People listen to talk radio because the mainstream media is too liberal for them. It makes sense for the Speaker to get the Republican message out to them."

Blogging is the end of "talking to" and the beginning of "talking with," guys. Try pushing a string, instead.

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Comments

who's clueless?

by Jon Garfunkel on October 28, 2005 - 12:23am

Ahh, the always reliable, quoteable, and cluetrainable:
"I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from 'message.' It is advertising. I want to avoid advertising!"

though before the Dean revolution, David wrote:
"If we had someone who could articulate our message in way that gave us heart and made the case clearly to those who don't yet Get It, and who was able to move our cause forward, well, I would be happier than I am now."

I would wager that messaging-- even the occasional anti-message-- is still pretty crucial to politics and marketing.

Now, the question about the blog. Bonjean's quotes are hardly clueless; he's quoting directly from Sullivan (blogs are like talk radio) and Hewitt/Powerline et al (MSM too liberal) and Jarvis/Gillmor/Rosen (goodbye media gatekeepers). That's pretty standard trope.

So what if he uses his blog for broadcast? The link between blogs and conversations is phantom, and I've detailed this before.

What would you point out as a good example of a Congressional blog?
Have a look at John Conyers's blog-- the first from Congress. Is this a good structure, or are we merely conditioned that because it's a clone of the Kos style it's good? And when you read through, wouldn't you say that it's still very much a broadcast model?

Coneyers does not appear to even post in the comments. Maybe because he doesn't know who the commenters are. Maybe because the flat threading is unreadable. I haven't found anything like "as I was talkng to one of my constituents..." He did mention touching down in his district once in the last several months, to stop by some parties related to the Downing Street Memos.

If you'd ask me, I'd like something truly transparent: something his staff uses to communicate. Something the high rollers communicate in. That's true Open Governance. With the Social Media blogging world, one gets the feeling that a majority of the conversation happens in a public online forum, and that's what makes it seem legitimate.

on Congressional blogs

by Micah L. Sifry on October 30, 2005 - 2:56pm

Jon--Right now Members of Congress are using their blogs to dress up their press releases and talking points. It's not surprising to hear them compare it to talk-radio; there too they have used a two-way medium primarily for one-way communication.

What I would like to see is a Member use blogging, or related community-conversation tools (see digg.com for an example) to host and nurture an open discussion among their constituents, or among all the people who care about an issue. But that presupposes that Members of Congress think of themselves as organizers and conveners, and not just political entrepreneurs who are mainly concerned with raising money and ensuring their own re-election. The irony is, so many of the House members have safe seats; if they were to experiment with spurring many-to-many conversation online among their constituents it could hardly hurt their prospects for re-election.

p.s. I like Conyers' blog mainly because it has the ring of being actually written by him. I don't know that for a fact, but I doubt anyone else could have written his reminiscence about working with Rosa Parks for 20 years, for example.

The Speaker's Superficial Journal

by Danny Glover on October 30, 2005 - 6:51pm

Here's my take at Beltway Blogroll (http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2005/10/capitollink_...):

"The substance of Hastert's first post at the Speaker's Journal isn't exactly the stuff of front-page news. He bills it as a forum where people can gain 'inside access to the Republican playbook,' but that appears to be a bit of false advertising, what with his superficial talk about hurricane recovery and oil refineries.

Hastert also doesn't appear ready to fully seize the conversational spirit of the blogosphere. He doesn't offer comments on his blog, and he starts his first post by describing the new online venue as 'a new way for us to get our message out.' That kind of talk doesn't exactly inspire much confidence that readers can expect the 'unfiltered updates on Capitol Hill' that Hastert promises a few sentences later.

Hastert ends the post like this: 'Well, there you have it folks. I've outlined some of our priorities: fiscal responsibility and energy. I'm going to keep updating this from time to time. It's not that bad. Looks like this old guy can still learn a thing or two.'

Let's hope so."

contrast with Schakowsky... and yes, it's bigger than blogs

by Jon Garfunkel on October 31, 2005 - 12:29am

Again, it's Andrew Sullivan who originally compared blogs to talk radio. And he doesn't have comments on his blog, either. I've already quoted enough people back in 2004 on how blog is such a slippery term. It serves well as a megaphone-- something the blogging evangelists continue to be in denial about.

And I see no evidence that Conyers or Jan Schakowsky are actually interacting with the comments. What I like about Schakowsky's effort, more than Conyers, is that she's puttng things in perspective for her Chicago constituents and talking about Illinois issues, and even talking about the dynamics of a floor vote (but she doesn't point out that while the Dems lost a House vote 212-210, a number of Reps were MIA, like three of ours from the Bay State).

Of course, I have always maintained for years that constituents should think to first post to a forum which the congressional staff reads, instead of phoning or emailing. The blog-only approach ignores forums, which continues to be bad technical design.

I'd like to see PDF and TNJ take the lead on assembling a guide for elected leaders on how to blog or facilitate-an-online-community. Or I'd like to see you report on the constituent-correspondence vendors and press them to see how many of them plan to incorporate open forums in their systems.