The Speaker of the House’s… Blog?!
Found this one online tonight: on a busy political newsnight with the CIA leak case about to break and Harriet Miers withdrawing her Court nomination, Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, is kicking off a blog.
What’s so interesting about that?
It signals yet a further move mainstream in this democratizing medium. I’d be the first one to agree with many skeptics that blogging takes time (look how few and far between my postings are, sadly). And sure, the Speaker’s blog doesn’t look all that different than the other things politicians have been putting on their websites. But despite the hassle factor of actually having to write things down, despite the easy skepticism some have about how “most people won’t take time to write,” the depth and breadth in personal publishing over the past few years signal something fundamental:
We want to communicate person-to-person, in our own voices. We want to speak, and we want to be heard.
Welcome aboard, Mister Speaker. I hope you post more often than I do.