Thursday, June 01, 2006

USA Today Article on Congressmen who Blog

Well, sort of. USA Today's News section has a decent write up on blogging. While I don't usually blog about blogging, you can read more about it here.

It's interesting if for no other reason than to note these comments:

"Blogs are supposed to be personal online journals but few lawmakers write their own. Pence typed part of his recent travel blog on a laptop while flying between Baghdad and Ankara, Turkey, but says he usually writes less than 15% of entries. Patrick Leahy jots ideas into his BlackBerry; aides "fill in the facts" before posting it on his blog.

Blogs must be constantly updated to draw a following but that's "extremely taxing on staff," says Will Adams, the press aide who ran the blog of Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo."

To me the key distinction in blogging is who writes the blog. If I am not the author of the content or commentary, is it really a blog? I would probably not waste my time reading a blog if I knew, for example, that an injury law blog was written not by an attorney, but perhaps by his marketing guy. Ghost author, if you will.