While I think that blogging is a good thing, you can have too much of it. I’m talking about blogs by politicians. They tend to suck, by and large, because politicians just don’t grok blog style communication.
Belinda’s blog sucked. Ed Broadbent’s blog sucked, except for the notable post where he temporarily supersized his testicles by driving a moving truck. I can’t remember if Stephen Harper had a blog or not, but I’m sure that if he did it would have sucked too. Harper blogging about the day-to-day excitement in his life? That’s got to be on par with watching paint dry.
The top prize for all time politicial blog sucktitude goes to Paul Martin for the rarely updated and completely artificial piece of crap he used to run at his now defunct Paul Martin Times site. It was such a stinker that even Jim Elves of BlogsCanada fame (one of the nicest guys on the Canadian blogging scene) was hard pressed to find good things to say about it.
We have a civic election coming up here in Edmonton on October 18th. I was checking out the Web site of the mayoral candidate I’m planning to vote for when I discovered to my horror that he’s going to be running a blog. Morbid curiosity will compel me to come back and have a look, but I hope it doesn’t scare me away from voting for him (and it probably will).
Sometimes less is more, and I’m starting to feel like I could use less communication with my elected representatives. How sad is that?