IN 2003, Tom Watson became the first member of Parliament (MP) to use a weblog. This online application (which may best be described as a website with a standardised yet flexible structure and content management system) is viewed by some to have the potential to boost and, perhaps, transform political engagement. In an effort to explore this potential, in July 2004, the Hansard Society eDemocracy Programme undertook a study of the UK’s first handful of political blogs—citizen, civic and parliamentary—using a citizen jury to assess their content and nature. The finding of our study, published in Political Blogs: Craze or Convention?, revealed that blogging may be intriguing to the media, academia and technologists, but it was failing to excite the body politic more generally. Our jury, consisting of individuals with varying degrees of political experience and little, if any, previous exposure to blogging, was muted in its reaction to the blogs. They did not find the content or the bloggers engaging, and while they could envisage the technology’s potential to stimulate greater political engagement, their experience of the sample blogs was disappointing.
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Ross Ferguson (2006) studied this question.