Benny Baagø, journalist at Computerworld.dk, has embarked on an interesting project which aims at studying the current state of affairs of the Danish Politicians' homepages. So far, he is posting about his findings in Computerworld's Usability Blog.

Benny made an interview with me yesterday about what it looks like on the "blog front", since in 2005 a research assistant and I made a survey of how many of the people running for parliament blogged (findings here), so I'm credited for being someone who knows about this part of the blogosphere (hmmh). In order to give him some qualified answers, I thought it could be fun to update our survey, i.e. see how many of the people who blogged then (february 2005) still blogs.

The result is quite interesting. In February 2005, 53 politicians ran a blog or had engaged in a blog-like activity during the election campaign (which ran for only 20 days) - in fact, only 52, since one of the "blogs" turned out to be just one post consisting of a transcription of an election diary he had written for a newspaper).

What is the state of these blogs today? In October 2006, 14 of these candidates (of whom several were in fact elected for parliament) are still blogging in some form. In addition, one person is running a small temporary blog about the restoration of a pond so I discount this, since this blog is quite new. 14 out of 52 is roughly 27% - in other words, less than 1/3 have continued their activities. But perhaps a ratio of almost 1/3 still blogging after more than a year is actually a pretty good track record? It should be noted that of the 14 blogs,
- 10 are dedicated blogs focusing on politics and opinions related to a "political" topic
- 2 focus on private life and experiences (not really related to politics),
- 1 was last updated in March (so is she still blogging? - however it still features on her website)
- 1 is basically a "calendar diary" (describing in short facts what the politician did on a particular day, but with no reflection and discussion of political subjects).
I havent had time to look closely into it, but my intuition is that several of the people blogging now, also blogged before the election campaign started, i.e. they have been used to blogging for a long time, and have, as a starting point, not been dependant on the election campaign to find material to write about. Oh, and very few of them use the comment function.

Several of the politicians who do not blog anymore have removed the blog completely from their website. A few have no webpresence at all anymore. In this context, it should be noted that we looked at all the people who ran for a seat in parliament and several of these have a completely different dayjob and are not professional politicians. Hence some of them might by now have withdrawn completely from the political scene. However, others still engaged in politics have left the election campaign blog online, and some of them also ran a election campaign blog for the municipalities election last fall (november 2005).

So, all in all, considered that maintaining a blog requires time and engagement, the state of things could be worse (none of the people who blogged then could be blogging now). But the fact that so many of the politicians whose blogs we looked at, do not blog anymore indicates that it will take some time before the blog as a communicative political genre takes foothold in Denmark. As is, 89% of the politicians' who responded to our online survey in February-March 2005 (roughly 50% of the bloggers) said that they would blog again during the next election campaign. We have still to see if this will happen.

Fyi, I haven't looked at how many of the politicians, who have a seat in parliament, blog. However, Benny, who has looked at the websites of all of them, when I talked to him, confirmed that it is a precious few. Niels Helveg Petersen is one of them. This is the official list of the members of parliament, so feel free to go check out for yourself.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 09:23