It’s Thursday evening, in a stuffy conference room at the Harvard law school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and weblogging champion Dave Winer is holding court.
This is a corner of America famous for the Boston tea party, which ignited America’s war of independence. And this little group of students and weblogging enthusiasts is talking about sparking what they claim will be another revolution — this time in politics and journalism, delivered by the power of the web.
The claim might sound far-fetched, but Winer is not one to mask his ambitions. ”We will all live to see the day a weblogger becomes president,” he tells the group, as he updates a weblog being projected on to a large screen. With a brisk ”Let’s talk about New Hampshire,” they start discussing how to evangelise word of the blog to one of the 2004 presidential race’s most vital states.
Weblogs — easily updated homepages full of commentary and links — have been around for years, and Winer’s Scripting News weblog was one of the first. But they have swept the web in recent years, gaining mainstream attention following the September 11 attacks, when such webloggers as Glenn Reynolds were catapulted to worldwide fame for searing commentaries and right-wing political punditry.
Winer also had his views on the war, but he was well known before then, to the Silicon Valley technology crowd at least. He made his name as a pioneering programmer in the 1980s and founded Userland software, a maker of web publishing software, in 1988.
These days, he takes a back-seat role with the company. Instead, from his position as a Berkman fellow at Harvard, he is spreading the blogging gospel: about how easy the pages are to set up, about how blogging is revealing the unedited voices of millions around the world.
The project this summer is to ”seed” political weblogging in New Hampshire, urging voters to start online diaries to record the campaign. His aim? To force candidates to address issues in a more consistent and honest way.
Winer proclaims no party political agenda. He simply wants rid of the opinion pollled ”slicing and dicing” that has candidates saying whatever they think the particular demographic listening wants to hear.
With an army of webloggers presenting reports and transcripts of the candidates’ every public move, he sees as inevitable a new atmosphere of plain talking. ”The 2000 election in the US was a tie, and the candidates never told us about themselves,” says Winer.
”They lied, they struggled to make themselves stand for absolutely nothing, and the voters were powerless to do anything about it. In 2004, they won’t be powerless. The question is, will they use the power?”
To persuade them, Winer is heading north to New Hampshire to visit college campuses — fertile ground for the weblog phenomenon. He will train a few trailblazers, who will train others. An ambition is to equip and then unmask — first to themselves, then the world — a blogging star of the state similar to Reynolds, now known as the ”warblogger”.
It is not just the politicians who should be afraid. Weblogging, says Winer, is coming after journalism, too. ”In 2004, the opportunity is to have the citizens cover the candidates and root around the journalists who do an absolutely terrible job.
”If I were in your business,” Winer tells me, ”I’d embrace this stuff as quickly as I could, and make the changes that it requires of you. The changes are going to come. Every industry that has ever had to deal with this has learned the lessons.
”The software industry had to deal with this in the 80s, and did not deal with it very well. [It was] the entertainment industry in the 90s with music and the movie industry, and it’s coming for the media — for journalism, for reporters, newspapers.”
With Winer’s plans at an advanced stage, America — and its media — is beginning to see how weblogs, and the ease with which they make it possible to reach an online audience, might change things. In the UK, the hype is only slowly beginning to kick in. But there is a political weblogging evangelist hard at work on this side of the pond, as well.
Tim Ireland, a web consultant and weblogger, is trying to persuade MPs to emerge from behind their pagers, and confess all — or at least something — to their own blogs.
Although his invective is less strident than Winer’s, his themes are similar: the importance of direct communication and of creating new discussions.
”This isn’t a fad,” insists Ireland. ”This is part of the evolution of online publishing. It’s only going to evolve, and the only reason it’s so popular is that it has that personal aspect, the communication aspect that people have been craving for years after one-way communication.” But how does this transfer to the rough and tumble world of politics? ”[An MP] who wishes to communicate in this way can say ‘this is what is shaping my decisions’,” says Ireland.
”They can say ‘I haven’t decided what I’m doing with this particular issue.. come and help’.” Ireland’s favourite example of how effective weblogs can be comes from one of only two MPs currently blogging. Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, has been campaigning on airgun laws. Type ”airgun laws” into Google.co.uk, and Wat son’s weblog is top of the rankings.
”This is a big benefit for most MPs. This is not only showing their constituents how they’re working on a day-by-day basis, they draw people to them who care about issues they care about, be they constituents or not.
”With something like airgun laws, it is not a local issue — it is a national issue. They can draw people into their fold who want to support them.”
Isn’t there a danger that backbench MPs — technically responsible to their constituencies — could spend too much time communicating with a web audience scattered around the world? Watson concedes this is a danger, and says he does not see the weblog as necessarily a vote winner.
”I’m missing time in the garden, rather than in Westminster. But I do find it personally satisfying.” Watson’s weblog is not just a diary of life in the palace of Westminster — although there are endearing breathless entries about big debates and famous visitors scattered through his journal. He also uses the weblog to link deep into the wealth of information being put online by Whitehall, attempting to explain and add context to otherwise lifeless documents.
”You can start debate, and engage people you wouldn’t normally have engaged,” he says, ”and that’s what I’m beginning to find fascinating.
Watson does not describe himself as a techie, but the blogging world’s latest Commons recruit certainly has the credentials. Sheffield Hallam MP Richard Allan, the Lib Dems’ information technology spokesperson, says his weblog — which went live last month — has had an instant impact.
”I’ve had more comments and interest in the blog in two weeks than I had in the regular website in months,” says Allan, who plans to step down at the next election, possibly to take up a role in IT with the NHS, where he used to work. ”There are two things that are different about blogging. First, it’s an active, participative medium… people instinctively engage with it.
”The other is the viral nature of the publicity: on Sunday [I was putting] the code together for the site, and didn’t tell anyone about it. I thought at some point in the week I’d put some publicity out about it. By Monday morning I had my first comment, and it snowballed from there.”
The two MPs are enthusiastic advocates of weblogging, while Ireland predicts that as many as half of the MPs could have their own web diaries by the next general election. But will we, I ask Watson, ever see a minister or prime minister (or a spin master) start blogging?
”I certainly think we’ll see a cabinet minister blogging,” he says. ”It’s almost liberating to be able to bang out my own take on things without relying on people to interpret what I’m saying or thinking.”
For a few of today’s beleaguered politicians, a filterless medium might prove an alluring concept. A Blair blog, a Campbell confessional? Now that would be revolutionary stuff.
Booming blogs
Blogger, the company behind the web’s most popular weblogging tool, was acquired by search engine Google earlier this year and is now rolling out a new version of its software which will make it easier to add new features to 1,5-million registered users (the actual number of active weblogs is likely much fewer). Jason Shellen, associate program manager of Blogger, told a recent weblogging conference that new community features would come next, possibly including a weblog search using Google’s search technology. Six Apart, maker of the more complex Movable Type system, is in advanced testing for a new product, Typepad, which will make it easier for non-technical computer users to air their thoughts online. The incumbents need to innovate: new players are arriving on the scene at an impressive rate. 20six is a European player with the emphasis on photo blogging from camera-equipped mobile phones. Easyjournal makes great play of its community-building features. – Guardian Unlimited Â