Thursday, March 04, 2004 2:16 PM
While there has been significant discussion about the fact that all of the leading candidates in the U.S. Presidential election maintain campaign blogs, there has not been much coverage of sad reality that, in general, legislative and executive branches have not done much to follow suit.
Looking overseas. Perhaps tired of waiting for action, a group in the United Kingdom decided to create its own govblog specifically covering daily updates from No. 10 Downing Street's press office. This govblog cuts-and-pastes information gathered from the daily meeting between Prime Minister's Official Spokesman and a "small coterie of political journalists" into blog-friendly snippets and an accompanying feed: Downing Street Says. Note for the U.S.: wouldn't it be useful if one of the journalists covering the White House press briefings did the same?
Thinking about all of the information flowing out of government entities (not to mention our elected officials' offices), only to be buried in myriad websites and databases, the weblog and feed concept surely could play a powerful role in better dissemination of public information; it may just take some more 'cut and paste" webloggers to get it done.