Hvor mange blogger stadig - her 20 måneder efter valgkampen?

Ansporet af Benny Baagø, journalist på Computerworld.dk, som er ved at skrive en række artikler om danske politikeres hjemmesider (og blogger om det), har jeg lavet en lille undersøgelse af hvem af de 53 politikere, der bloggede under valgkampen, der stadig blogger her ca 20 måneder efter valgkampen er slut.

Jeg har skrevet om hvad jeg har fundet ud af, på min daglige blog, Klastrup's Cataclysms. Den skriver jeg på engelsk for også at kommunikere med mine udenlandske kollegaer, og jeg har ikke tid til at oversætte til dansk, så her er en kopi af hvad jeg har skrevet der:

The result is quite interesting. In February 2005, 53 politicians had 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 transcribtion 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. 1 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 then (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.

Uformel undersøgelse om svenske valgkamps-bloggere

En lille uformel undersøgelse af hvor mange "riksdagsledamöter" der har blogger op til eller i forbindelse med den nyligt svenske valgkamp viser at ud af de 349 siddende medlemmer, bloggede ca 23 %. Tallet er baseret på en ren google søgning på medlemmernes navne, kun hvis de var på "top ti", kom de med. 23 procent riksdagsledamöter bloggade.

Vores undersøgelse i international akademisk publikation!

Det er med en vis stolthed, at jeg kan berette, at det akademiske paper, der kom ud af vores undersøgelse: "Blogging for Election - The Use and Function of Blogs as Communication Tool in a Danish Parliament Election Campaign" for øjeblikket er i trykken, og udkommer som en af få udvalgte papers i The Internet Research Annual - Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conference 2005, Volume 4. Annualen kan købes via Peter Lang Publishers, der udgiver den.
Forskere, studerende, journalister - og selvfølgelig de involverede politikere - kan også få adgang til en sen kladde-version af artiklen ved personlig henvendelse per mail til Lisbeth.

Akademisk paper om politisk blog undersøgelse i Tyskland

På konferencen Blogtalk 4.0 her i oktober 2006, har Roland Abold og Maren Heltsche præsenteret en artikel om en undersøgelse af den tyske valgkamp i 2005, hvor de har set på blogindlæg fra valgkampens sidste 11 uger samt interviewet 1300 internet brugere: Weblogs in Political Campaigns – The Critical Success Factors (linket er til en pdf-fil med hele artiklen).