Monday, April 13, 2009

Is this the age of the political blogger?

Even the most powerful communicators can get it wrong at times. Damian McBride, now a former adviser to Gordon Brown at No. 10, will no doubt be wishing he had never suggested blogging about Tory politicians to his erstwhile friend Derek Draper who runs LabourList, a blog for Labour party supporters. For those of us with long memories, Derek Drapper was also caught up in a much earlier Labour row back in 1998 about lobbying.




Picture from: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1022168



McBride should never have forgotten where and who he works for and the immense influence his job gave him. It is always easy to communicate but not always necessary to do it.

However, for Paul Staines it is a massive success for him and his Guido Fawkes' blog. In the UK political bloggers have taken a long time to become popular or influential, unlike the US, where blogs dominated the recent presidential election and President Obama raised most of his funds via Internet sites or various types.

If, as Harold Wilson famously said, a week is a long time in politics, then in then new cyberworld bloggers will speed that up to make just a few minutes a long time in politics.
Perhaps this could be the age of the political blogger.

2 comments:

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  2. I agree with you, this is the age of political blogger!! As the Indian general elections have already started, in all these time, most of the political parties used blogging as a medium to target the youth voters, that has the maximum voting strength of 50%. The internet usage is more amongst the young people so blog becomes the obvious way to communicate and this is growing very fast!!

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