Seven Oaks Magazine.

These days, everybody has one. Your friends have them, profs have them, journalists have them. Even Noam Chomsky has one. Moby does too. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many politicians are also jumping on the latest Internet trend. In the United States, the campaigns of both President George W. Bush and Democratic Party nominee John Kerry feature blogs, also known as weblogs, on their official websites. During their candidacies for the leadership of the Canadian Liberal and Conservative parties, respectively, Prime Minister Paul Martin and Belinda Stronach also kept blogs.

But what is a blog? Well, it depends on whom you ask. According to the Bush campaign (http://www.georgewbush.com/blog/): "A blog is a free-flowing online journal that's constantly updated with the latest news from throughout the Web. This blog will serve as your personal guide to the campaign to re-elect President Bush, with breaking news, grassroots updates, and posts from campaign leadership." Paul Martin Times, the site of Paul's Blog (http://www.paulmartin.ca/personal-paul/blogs_e.asp), does a better job: "No, it's not a swamp creature. It's a term used to describe an Internet trend that has exploded over the last decade. A blog is a small web page made up of short, regularly updated messages that are arranged in chronological order - like a 'what's new' page, or a journal."

Political campaign blogs come in two basic forms. Some candidates, like Martin, claim to author the content of their blogs. Other blogs, including Bush's and Kerry's (http://blog.johnkerry.com/), read more like a series of press releases posted by campaign staffers than journal entries. Either way, blogs are carving out a new niche for political discussion, adding excitement to the campaign trail, and perhaps even changing the nature of electoral politics. "In the current U.S. presidential elections, blogs are continuing to heat up the race," Marcelo Vieta, a communication graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, says by email. Vieta, who maintains the blog Technology, Self, and Community (http://arago.cprost.sfu.ca/marcelo/), continues: "In fact, this is the first major U.S. presidential campaign to use blogs, mainly because blogs have only really been around in their current form since '97 or '98, and they've only really taken off since 9/11."

"Tomorrow is the big day," wrote Bill Cunningham on January 30. "We're going to officially launch my campaign for the Liberal nomination in the riding of Burnaby-Douglas. There are a million thoughts running through my head." With these words, the Canadian politician began his first entry on his Blog for Burnaby (http://www.mywebsites.ca/bill/blog.htm). Since then, Cunningham, 34, who hopes to run for Parliament in the next federal election, has posted to his campaign blog at a rate of more than once a week. "I wasn't sure how exactly it would develop over time," he says during a telephone interview. "But it certainly has developed to be more personal than political. Rather than using this as just another forum to talk about issues and talk about where I stand, it actually has developed into something that is much more about me as a person, I think, than anything else."

Cunningham maintains he personally updates his blog with Microsoft FrontPage and no one else edits his entries. He also says he's encouraged other candidates to start blogs. "I really find that I do enjoy it. It helps me organise and focus myself on the campaign trail," Cunningham says. "I find that when I haven't updated it for more than a few days, I start thinking, 'Oh jeez, I want to get back and update it.' Or if I'm at an event and something interesting happens, I'm thinking, 'Oh jeez, I've got to make a note of this and put it in my weblog.'"

He says his blog has even helped him gain a better understanding of himself. "I find that I go back, and I'm looking at past entries, and I start to see reoccurring themes that weren't intentional or weren't conscious. So, if there's a particular issue that I find that I'm writing about repeatedly, that's an insight into what types of things really are motivating me."

For Cunningham, his Blog for Burnaby has become an important component of his campaign. On it, he's written about his support for the prime minister, meeting with students, and going to a Metallica concert. More often than not, people commenting about his website are talking about his blog. If blogs help politicians reach a younger audience, Cunningham says, that's another good reason to use them.

But if he wins the Liberal nomination, Cunningham would face a veteran politician who doesn't intend to launch a campaign blog. Svend Robinson from the New Democratic Party says it's just not his style. "I'm very open; I'm very accountable to the people I represent," the member of Parliament told Seven Oaks in March. "But spilling my guts on an Internet blog diary everyday is not something that I'm into."

"I know, I know... I haven't updated my blog in weeks, and the electorate is starting to get restless. But with a campaign coming up, it's time for me to share all kinds of exciting news again," a Paul Martin-impostor wrote April 8 on the Martintrospection Blog (http://paulmartintime.ca/martintrospection/).

"The real reason, though, is that my weblog entries were boring," the impostor continued a paragraph later. "Why else would they erase all mention of my weblog from my own site? If you know ahead of time that I'm not going to say anything outside of my predictable routine of the party line, and vision for Canada (I keep it extremely vague for a reason; more on that later), then there's not much point in reading it, is there?"

The Martintrospection Blog , a satirical interpretation of Paul's Blog , is part of Paul Martin Time, a parody of the prime minister's website. "We think that the key source of dysfunction in Canadian democracy - and others - is misinformation," Dru Oja Jay, one of the people behind Paul Martin Time, says by email from Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Corporate media coverage of politics serves to actively distract citizens from the important questions that we are all facing politically: inequality, homelessness, institutionalised unemployment, 'deep integration,' and the privatisation of education, health care, and culture. So our strategy is to provide critical analysis and point to what Paul Martin is actually doing, but in a way that is at once humorous and substantial, and hopefully appealing to people who normally aren't 'interested in politics.'"

Jay, the co-ordinating editor of the Dominion, a progressive newspaper with a frequently updated blog (http://dominionpaper.ca/weblog/), asserts that blogs aren't particularly well used by political campaigns because their writers tend to play it safe. "Because most politicians naturally don't want to take stands when they don't have to, the kind of off-the-cuff commentary that makes weblogs interesting is almost universally missing from weblogs purportedly authored by politicians themselves."

On April 2, the Kerry campaign revealed that it raised over $26 million during the first quarter of 2004 through online donations. That figure accounts for slightly more than half the total amount of contributions received by the campaign over the same period. In one day, March 4, the website raked in $2.6 million. "It's sort of the year of the Internet in politics," Bryan Keefer, assistant managing editor of the Campaign Desk (http://www.campaigndesk.org/), a blog published by the Columbia Journalism Review to analyse coverage of the U.S. election campaigns, says by telephone from New York.

The presidential campaigns are using their websites more effectively than they did four years ago, placing greater emphasis on making them interactive - and that's where blogs come in. For instance, Kerry's blog allows readers to append their own comments to each entry. It also links to other political blogs. (The Bush blog, however, does neither of these things.)

Campaign websites, and blogs in particular, are even accelerating the pace of competition in the U.S. election race, according to Keefer, who is also an editor of Spinsanity (http://www.spinsanity.org/), a blog that bills itself as a watchdog of political rhetoric. "They're using them, in part, as a rapid response tool," he says. "The way Kerry and Bush are using it at least is to really cut - even though its only April - this real tit for tat campaign. It's just been going back and forth. Kerry puts up an ad, Bush puts up an ad a day later."

Former Democratic candidate Howard Dean and his Blog for America (http://www.blogforamerica.com/) kicked the trend of political campaign blogging into high gear by raising large sums of money through small online donations and garnering considerable media attention. But that's not all Blog for America accomplished, Jay says.

"The official Dean site would link to hundreds of individual weblogs, many of which were regularly disagreeing with Dean on crucial issues," he explains. "You had people discussing all kinds of different issues, developing campaign ideas, and setting up meetings and raising funds. The central Dean campaign would then cherry pick the best campaign ideas, and - at least in theory - use the policy discussion as a source of inspiration for its platform. The campaign balanced the consistent party line with the opportunity for participation, and that struck a chord with thousands of people. It also helped raise millions of dollars and mobilise thousands of volunteers - not something that any politician should be ignoring.

"The Dean campaign was hardly the epitome of democracy, but its model of combining direct participation with an electoral campaign is extremely compelling," Jay continues. "What would happen, for example, if a party was set up so that the participants actually had formal influence, as opposed to the appearance or feeling of influence?"

While campaign blogs have proven their ability to help raise funds and generate a buzz, their influence at the ballot box is debatable. Dean ended his candidacy after suffering loss after loss in the primaries. (But his campaign, Dean for America, has survived by transforming itself into Democracy for America). "The Internet support hadn't really translated into people on the ground in New Hampshire and Iowa," Keefer says. "So, he didn't really mobilise voters in those two states, and because of that, and because the primary process is now so compressed, the momentum kind of killed him. By the end of it, the ship was taking on so much water that he couldn't bail it fast enough - blog or not."

In the Canadian Conservative leadership race, although Stronach's website featured a blog that's no longer online, winner Stephen Harper's didn't. "This might have been due to the fact that both Stronach and Dean had many under-30 supporters who also happen to be those who make up the most avid bloggers, while the power-players in the mainstream party system still tend to be older, less computer-savvy voters and players," Vieta suggests. "For this reason, I suspect, their youthful grassroots supporters and the traditional levers of power didn't connect, regardless of the blog-influenced interest they generated."

In any case, campaign blogs are playing an increasingly significant role in electoral politics. As candidates discover more ways to use them, their importance to their campaigns can only grow. Perhaps even more exciting than campaign blogs themselves are the spaces for dialogue created by the ever-growing network of blogs devoted to political commentary. While many such blogs serve only to rehash or link to the mainstream news, the vast number of posts and comments offering substantive discourse on critical issues everyday offers hope of a future where political debates truly occur in the public realm.

But as Jay points out: "All of the above has to be understood in the context of the deeply problematic distribution of resources. Though there are homeless people with weblogs, the average income of people who 'blog' is quite a bit higher than the average of those who vote."