This entry was posted on
Sunday, April 17th, 2005 at
3:21 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

I tuned into Radio 4 this morning to hear a short piece during Broadcasting House on the subject of protest voting and weblogs. The ‘expert’ they wheeled out to speak about this was Professor Stephen Coleman, often touted as a ‘Professor of E-democracy’.

He insisted – and not for the first time – that weblogs require a lot of work, and therefore would not be of interest/benefit to most MPs.

This opinion comes from a man who does not own, manage or run a weblog himself.

“Perhaps,” I hear you say, “as an academic, he arrived at this judgement via the careful and objective *study* of weblogs.”

Well, I now have one big problem with that theory. And it’s this…

When questioned about protest voting sites (of which there are about 6 running in this election) he clearly referenced two or three of these sites and one “wanting to keep/retain Blair”…

There is only one site that he could possibly be referring to, and that’s BackingBlair.co.uk – or, as Stephen would regard it – BackingBlair.co.uk; because it would appear that he’s made this judgement based on the domain name alone.

(author emails Stephen Coleman via coleman AT netcomuk DOT co DOT uk to see what he has to say for himself)

FFS… Did he not even ask himself why protest votes would be necessary to support the leader of the leading party?

UPDATE – Well, what do you know? The email bounced. The man doesn’t even have a decent level of accessibility.

RELATED – Independent – Pulling voters into the web of Westminster: Communication is key in politics, but how well do MPs perform on the internet? Kathryn Corrick casts her vote. (Cheers to Peter for the heads-up.)

UPDATE – Stephen Coleman appears to have actually made a blog entry after all. It’s one of ten posts, by the looks of things. Boy, no wonder he thinks this blogging lark is such hard work.