These days, everybody has one. Your friends have them, profs havethem, journalists have them. Even Noam Chomsky has one. Moby doestoo. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many politiciansare also jumping on the latest Internet trend. In the U.S., thecampaigns of both President George W. Bush, Democratic Partynominee John Kerry and former hopeful Howard Dean feature blogs, also known as weblogs, on theirofficial websites. During their candidacies for the leadership ofthe Canadian Liberal and Conservative parties, respectively, PrimeMinister Paul Martin and Belinda Stronach also kept blogs.

But what is a blog? Well, it depends on whom you ask. According tothe Bush campaign: “A blog is afree-flowing online journal that’s constantly updated with thelatest news from throughout the Web. This blog will serve as yourpersonal guide to the campaign to re-elect President Bush, withbreaking news, grassroots updates and posts from campaignleadership.”

Paul Martin Times, the site of Paul’s Blog, does a betterjob: “No, it’s not a swamp creature. It’s a term used to describe anInternet trend that has exploded over the last decade. A blog is asmall web page made up of short, regularly updated messages that arearranged in chronological order — like a ‘what’s new’ page, or ajournal.”

Some candidates,like Martin, claim to author the content of their blogs. Otherblogs, including Bush’s and Kerry’s,read more like a series of press releases posted by campaignstaffers than journal entries.

“In the current U.S. presidential elections, blogs arecontinuing to heat up the race,” Marcelo Vieta, a communicationgraduate student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. says. Vieta, who maintains the blog Technology,Self, and Community continues: “In fact, this is the first major U.S. presidentialcampaign to use blogs, mainly because blogs have only really beenaround in their current form since ’97 or ’98, and they’ve onlyreally taken off since 9/11.”

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“I know, I know… I haven’t updated my blog in weeks, and theelectorate is starting to get restless. But with a campaign comingup, it’s time for me to share all kinds of exciting news again,” aPaul Martin-impostor wrote April 8 on The Martintrospection Blog. “The real reason, though, is that my weblog entries were boring,”the impostor continued a paragraph later. “Why else would they eraseall mention of my weblog from my own site? If you know ahead of timethat I’m not going to say anything outside of my predictable routineof the party line, and vision for Canada (I keep it extremely vaguefor a reason; more on that later), then there’s not much point inreading it, is there?”

The Martintrospection Blog, a satirical interpretation of Paul’sBlog, is part of Paul Martin Time, a parody of the prime minister’swebsite. “We think that the key source of dysfunction in Canadiandemocracy — and others — is misinformation,” Dru Oja Jay, one ofthe people behind Paul Martin Time, says. “Corporate media coverage of politics serves to activelydistract citizens from the important questions that we are allfacing politically: inequality, homelessness, institutionalizedunemployment, ‘deep integration,’ and the privatization ofeducation, health care, and culture. So our strategy is to providecritical analysis and point to what Paul Martin is actually doing,but in a way that is at once humorous and substantial, and hopefullyappealing to people who normally aren’t ‘interested in politics.’”

Jay, the co-ordinating editor of the Dominion, a progressivenewspaper with a frequently updated blog asserts that blogs aren’tparticularly well used by political campaigns because their writerstend to play it safe. “Because most politicians naturally don’t wantto take stands when they don’t have to, the kind of off-the-cuffcommentary that makes weblogs interesting is almost universallymissing from weblogs purportedly authored by politiciansthemselves.”

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In the U.S., former Democratic candidate Howard Dean and his Blog for America kicked the trend of politicalcampaign blogging into high gear by raising large sums of moneythrough small online donations and garnering considerable mediaattention. But that’s not all Blog for America accomplished, Jaysays.

“The official Dean site would link to hundreds of individualweblogs, many of which were regularly disagreeing with Dean oncrucial issues,” he explains. “You had people discussing all kindsof different issues, developing campaign ideas, and setting upmeetings and raising funds. The central Dean campaign would thencherry pick the best campaign ideas, and — at least in theory —use the policy discussion as a source of inspiration for itsplatform. The campaign balanced the consistent party line with theopportunity for participation, and that struck a chord withthousands of people. It also helped raise millions of dollars andmobilize thousands of volunteers — not something that anypolitician should be ignoring.

“The Dean campaign was hardly the epitome of democracy, but itsmodel of combining direct participation with an electoral campaignis extremely compelling,” Jay continues. “What would happen, forexample, if a party was set up so that the participants actually hadformal influence, as opposed to the appearance or feeling ofinfluence?”

In the Canadian Conservative leadership race, although Stronach’swebsite featured a blog that’s no longer online, winner StephenHarper’s didn’t.

“This might have been due to the fact that bothStronach and Dean had many under-30 supporters who also happen to bethose who make up the most avid bloggers, while the power-players inthe mainstream party system still tend to be older, lesscomputer-savvy voters and players,” Vieta suggests. “For thisreason, I suspect, their youthful grassroots supporters and thetraditional levers of power didn’t connect, regardless of theblog-influenced interest they generated.”

In any case, campaign blogs are playing an increasingly significantrole in electoral politics. As candidates discover more ways to usethem, their importance to their campaigns can only grow. Perhapseven more exciting than campaign blogs themselves are the spaces fordialogue created by the ever-growing network of blogs devoted topolitical commentary. While many such blogs serve only to rehash orlink to the mainstream news, the vast number of posts and commentsoffering substantive discourse on critical issues every day offershope of a future where political debates truly occur in the publicrealm.

But as Jay points out: “All of the above has to be understood in thecontext of the deeply problematic distribution of resources. Thoughthere are homeless people with weblogs, the average income of peoplewho ‘blog’ is quite a bit higher than the average of those whovote.”