Over in Salon, Scott Rosenberg has a good opinion piece up about the blogging on/blogging off that's happening in the Edwards campaign. He asks the right questions/makes the right points here:
I suppose some of this is inevitable when the practice of blogging meets the crucible of presidential campaigns. I just wonder what the point of bringing bloggers into the political machinery is unless you let them be bloggers. (This is a variation on the old debate about blogging from inside big companies, which I was pessimistic about several years ago, because I figured it would face similar hurdles.)
No doubt we're entering a long period of time in which people are going to be forced to ritually abase themselves and disown anything controversial they've written on a blog or elsewhere online before they are allowed to participate in the councils of power. And then, down the line -- just as we now have presidential candidates who freely admit that, once upon a time, they inhaled -- all of this will become somewhat quaint.
The half life of comments made on blogs and other social media like MySpace is effectively forever, which means we'll be seeing more and more of this. It brings up some interesting questions. 1. Should you -- or me -- be held accountable for something we said 20 years ago? 2. How much should we all respond to what clearly are partisan blogstorms? 3. If we embrace blogging and other direct forms of communication, and in so doing means we must water them down to committee speak, is that a step forward or not?
I've said previously that in the same way pornography was the early supporter and innovator for the web, politics has the potential to be the same for blogs and direct communications. But from what I've seen so far from Edwards, we have a long way to go.
Answers to my own questions:
1. No, we all grow and evolve. Assuming there is evidence of evolution and maturity over time, we should embrace growth. However, if you believed one thing yesterday and did a 180 today because it was politically correct, that's another story.
2. As little as possible. Don't feed the beast.
3. No. If you are doing blogs by committee, just stop. There are other ways to communicate, be true to the art.