Civic Leadership BloggingGuidebook
Second EditionPublished by the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy, United Kingdom © 2007www.icele.org
About this guidebook
This guide has been compiled from a number of sources, includingindustry experts on blogging, with a particular focus on civic leadershipweblogging. Many of the examples are based on the experiences of agovernment-backed pilot into blogging in the public sector.The International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (ICELE)provides resources for local authorities concerning good practice ineDemocracy, and is a continuation of the Local eDemocracy NationalProject funded by the UK Government.This guide provides advice for civic leaders and councils regardinggood practice in relation to the subject matter.
ICELE would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this guide:
Griff Wigley, Blogging Coach, Minnesota USAThe Hansard Society (Political Blogs – Craze or Convention?)Wolverhampton City Council
For more guides, please visitwww.iceleguides.org © 2007: www.icele.org
Preface
T
he phenomenon of citizen journalism, facilitated by informationtechnology, is a worldwide success story. A weblog, or blog, is apersonal journal on the web. Weblogs express as many differentsubjects and opinions as there are people writing them. Some blogsare highly influential and have enormous readership while others areprimarily intended for a close circle of family and friends.Weblogs are essentially free (or very cheap) lightweight anddisposable content management systems. Often they come ready-packaged and provide an immediate structure for content.The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easilypublish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs area fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a ‘conversation’ than to a library – which is how the web has often been described in the past. With anincreasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting onblogs, the way we use the web is shifting in a fundamental way.Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and moreInternet users are becoming active participants.It is estimated that there are 55.2
*
million blogs worldwide and 75,000
*
new blogs each day. Most bloggers update their pages regularly; thereare about 1.2 million
*
posts daily or about 50,000
*
blog updates anhour. Around 55%
*
of bloggers are still posting three months after their blogs were created. This means that the ‘Blogosphere’ doubles everysix months; by 2009, there will be an estimated 8.8 billion blogs.Meanwhile, most blog readers/users tend to follow a relatively modestnumber of feeds
†
. The number of feeds ‘that really matter’ iscomparatively small and only tends to double each year compared tothe bi-annual growth of the blogosphere
†
.Increasingly, other forms of post – such as video blogs (vlogs),podcasts and amateur video clips – are contributing to the rich mediamix of citizen journalism. As such, the blogging platform of choicemust be able to handle, integrate and allow for easy manipulation of new media.
*
Source: Technorati.com, April 2006†Source: Ebiquity group, April 2006
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