October 07, 2003

GW's Campaign Weblog

At BloggerCon there was a session on Presidential campaign weblogs. All the panelists were Democrats because Bush-Cheney 2004 didn't have one. I even mentioned that I was dissappointed so far with Bush-Cheney's Internet efforts. That's surprising since Patrick Ruffini, the campaign's webmaster, used the weblog medium to great effect.

But I spoke too soon Saturday. In my inbox was a link to the campaign's new weblog. For a new weblog it's not bad. I'm happy to know that it isn't being used to repackage press releases. There's only one post on a campaign event. The rest are links to news stories and opinion pieces the support the Bush-Cheney agenda. The weblog doesn't accept comments. It might not be that the campaign doesn't care about supporters' feedback so much as they've seen the Duck weblog and don't know how to handle a conversation that large. (At BC, the chief weblogger for the Duck said they were getting 2000 comments a day.) So it's being used as another way to get their message out (there is even a RSS feed!) instead of as a community organizer.