mediajunk

Last month I told you that presidential candidate Howard Dean had started a blog. Now another candidate, Gary Hart, has launched a blog.

It remains to be seen whether Hart will update his own blog. More likely, it will be be updated by his "entourage". The comments section is moderated by someone called Kevin Thurman, who edits/deletes posts and limits the number of comments. To be fair, however, Mr. Thurman has allowed many negative/critical comments to be remain, such as the following:

Dear Mr. Hart, what makes you so different from all the other rich, old, white men who have the luxury of being big-time politicians?
Posted by Chris at March 28, 2003 09:30 AM

Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Senator. I hope this works - despite my snark, I think this is a great way for public figures to communicate with population at large. Maybe you'll start a trend.
Posted by George at March 28, 2003 09:44 AM

These high-profile moves into the blogosphere, whether you regard them as cynical or otherwise, at least indicate the growing recognition of the world's most exciting narrative form to have emerged in a generation.

*****

Speaking of the blog as narrative form: that was the thrust of the proposal I prepared with Gerald Adams for the upcoming BlogTalk conference. Unfortunately (for us), we learned yesterday that our proposal was not one of the lucky ones selected to be developed into a paper for the conference.

Still, I believe that Gerald and I managed to thrash out some good ideas in our proposal (albeit, admittedly, rather unfocused), which we may try to nurture and articulate more succinctly in the future.