Government monitors blogs
The government’s communications agency, the Central Office of Information (COI) is to monitor political discussions on blogs, widening its current media monitoring role.
That’s good news for so-called citizen journalists and cynical pundits whose chances of being heard by those in power will be enhanced. But blog monitoring is a tricky game.
The fundamental difficulty the COI will face is deciding which blogs are worth summarising for ministers. Anybody can publish their views, but that doesn’t mean those views are taken seriously by the wider public or that they’re read by more than a handful of people. Yet the size of readership may not be all that important. A blog entry that tops Google on a search for a piece of legislation may not reach many readers immediately, but over time could reach a great many including key stakeholders.
Critically government needs to avoid employing an army of junior press officers to spend their days reading the mind numbing rants of cranks.
Fortunately, the medium is already well covered by search engines, like Google Blog Search and Technorati. If they haven’t picked up the piece, it’s not worth bothering with as nobody is likely to find it. They allow anybody to watch an argument progress across the web. Each time somebody links to the article of interest, it’s flagged.
More interestingly, bloggers tend to cluster into small, like minded communities with clear dominant figures leading the pack. So while the sheer volume of material may appear daunting, the number of must read bloggers is actually quite small.
Comments (No comments)
There are no comments on this post so far.
Post a comment