Over at Evergreen Politics Ken’s good idea for a state party blog is getting a thorough airing. Good for Jon for putting it up there. Anyway, I put up this comment that I think bears posting here and some additional explanation:

I agree with Ken and Jon that there is a huge benefit for the Democratic party to have a blog, and especially to have Democratic officials (generally speaking) blogging.

Check out Dan Slater’s Blog (http://demnotes.com/), he’s the vice-chair of the Colorado Democratic Party. It is conversational, personal without being “look at the pictures of my new puppy,” and it pulls to cover off of what the Democratic Party is doing in that state.

I would encourage folks to read “Naked Conversation.” There are some interesting points about blogs in a business setting that I think also apply to the Democratic Party. One, especially, being that having a blog with comments (and replying to those comments) says you want input, you want conversation.

It is odd that a political party wouldn’t want to deliberately foster online conversation.

I am a bit puzzled by how this converation is being framed, that we see this “state party blog,” in whatever form it would take, as a risk to be handled and not an oppurtunity. Writing a blog in the most typical sense, accepting and replying to comments, encouraging folks to link to you stuff, is about opening your organization.

Whether the state party blog is a young staffer copying and pasting press releases into MoveableType or actually a Dwight Pelz or someone else up there actually blogging, the point is that it pulls back the curtain that some people see, instead of the actual party.