I attended the Blogging the Election conference in the Digital Hub on saturday. Last week, I wrote a short piece about an Active Citizenship event I was recently at – my civic spirit seems to be in flow at the moment.

It’s good to see bloggers focusing on a particular niche which is less about blogging and the technology/geek factor/ego, and more about the potential effects for a wider population and the public.

There is already a lot of commentary available from Slugger and  Elly and plenty to follow. I wanted to quickly mention a few things that might not otherwise be mentioned.

As part of the discussion, 3 Politicans each had a 7 minute slot to present. Ciaran Cuffe – Green Party TD, Dominic Halligan – Labour Councillor/General Election candidate and Damien Blake – Fianna Fail Town Councillor.

While all three were coming from different angles in terms of
motivation and rationale, there was a nodding of heads to the view that
by being out there using the medium is by itself recognition and
visibility for early bird politicians like these. My own view is that’s
where the comparison Ends.

Ciaran Cuffe clearly sees it (blogging) as the medium to show
elements of himself that show him as more of a person to his
constituents, while at the same time an area for fostering discussion
around issues affecting constituents.

Dominic Halligan uses his blog similarly to highlight constituency
issues, but highlighted his dilemma with trolls; this dilemma seemed to
hark back to debate that his own party had locally about the benefits
of blogging, and the need for understanding the medium.

In this sense, he could do with some of the savvyness to the medium
exhibited by Damien Blake. His business background in IT has made the
technical issues associated with blogging very much less of an issue
than to the other two. Given this, and that all politics are local, his
end goal is to be the #1 ranking on Google for all things Letterkenny.

On the theme of podcasting, Guido Fawkes
made an interesting comment. His view is that podcasting on the desktop
is silly – Vlogging is where it is at; If you have an audience that is
consuming content directly on the desktop, then maximise that content.

On a side note, the theme of the 3 break-out sessions at the end
were interesting. One group focused on impact with the general public,
and another on how to affect a change in Government using blogging. I
was on a group discussing how memes relating to  party policies and
“promises” could be retrospectively analysed for performance and
implementation.

More than a hint of subversion and out of the box thinking in the latter two …

Tags: blogging, ireland, irishblogcon, irishelection2007, irishpolitics, politics