Introducing Politico Bloggers

A while ago i registered the domain planetgov20.com so I could have a place to put any Gov20 projects I was working on. It started out as a simple blogroll of Gov20 blogs from around the country and then languished there awaiting new inspiration.

Inspiration came while I was doing some work on openausbot. As I was searching through the OpenAustralia member entries I started to wonder how many Politicians actually blog. So using “Da Powah!” of Drupal I decided to put together Politico Bloggers (also known as #polliebloggers on twitter).

The idea is to create a list of those politicians who run legitimate blogs (that is blogs that aren’t blatant PR feeds, have rss feeds and allow commenting). The list would be divided by nation as well as Government level. For the moment it’s going to be elected reps rather than Public Service types, however I can see that coming as well.

There’s a lot that needs to be done still, but one thing I’ve learnt already is that there a large number of Federal members who don’t actually seem to have a web site, let alone a blog, and that rss feeds are in short supply on those “blogs” that are run.

So if you know of a Pollie Blogger and s/he isn’t on the list already then please let us know. At the moment, we’re looking at Australia and New Zealand but will soon be expanding out to other nations (possibly the UK, US and Canada and then further afield).