September 20, 2007

Government in the Age of Web 2.0

The IBM Center on The Business of Government recently published a report on blogging in the public sector, titled "The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0." Very interesting stuff. It's a free download (Link. 99-page PDF) The research report was produced by Southeast Louisiana University management professor David Wyld

In the video of his his presentation based on the report, Wyld mentions Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen's blog, calling it, "one of the examples of how not to do this, because he started his blog, posted about five times, and then abandoned it." (See Part 2 of Wyld's video presentation.)

Wyld also mentions my VolPols.com project in passing.

VolPols.com, you may recall, was my offer of free blog hosting and free blogging training to any state legislator of either party who would blog at VolPols.com. Each legislator would have had their own URL - something like http://smith.volpols.com or www.volpols.com/smith - and the site was going to have an aggregator pull headlines from all of the legislators' individual blogs onto the home page, and into topic-oriented aggregated pages.

But no legislator ever took me up on the offer. Wyld's research paper mentions two Tennessee legislator-bloggers in connection with VolPols.com, but those blogs (by state Rep. Stacey Campfield and state Sen. Roy Herron) were not hosted at VolPols.com. Campfield's blog, though not Herron's, pre-dated VolPols.com.

I still own the VolPols.com website, though I now have no plans to pursue that project. Obviously, as the soon-to-be communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party I can't be offering blog help to Democrats.