Comments on Every Council Member Should Have a Blog

The key is balancing being frighteningly regular with being totally full of shit.

I was hoping this was going to be in the vein of the "every child needs a mother and father posts." Oh well.

Yes, please replace the newsletters -- or at least stop spamming them. Emailing your councilmember does NOT mean you want to receive the newsletter, unless the email SAYS "send me your newsletter". Which it doesn't -- couldn't, in fact, because no rational person could possibly want to see a councilmember's newsletter.

Oh god no!

Please, not MORE political blogs ...

Why do you hate us so?

A most excellent idea. They should tell us all their thoughts in real time in a permanent, easily researchable format, as they work through the many difficult issues they face and forge difficult compromises to get that fifth vote.

Why not live webcasting of their every conversation, too?

Heh heh heh....

Thanks for the heads up. I was not aware Tim Burgess had a blog. He even allows comments.
Muahahaha! Sorry...
I suppose making it a priority to fight violence against gays and trannies infriges on people's freedom of speech.

Get a load of this apostrophe!

The vet's answers to Senator Murray's questions [...]

I guess Josh Feit has a topic for his next column.

Awesome! I was unsure of voting for Burgess last time because of his history, but his blog definitely won me over next time around. I didn't realize anyone on the city council was actually this aware of homelessness issues. Extra points for his props to Plymouth Housing and Paul Lambros -- I'm a huge fan.

And every blog should have an RSS or ATOM feed.

Burgess' does. Clark's seems not to. I e-mailed the technical contact to find out if they're publishing a feed.

Does anyone who follows more than a dozen or so blogs really go browse to each of them individually nowadays? (Anyone who is unfamiliar with but interested in this topic should start with the Wkipedia aggregator article.)

Hows Hillary doing ECB?

A bit embarrased now?

Phil M -- I do. I hate RSS. I like the idea of it, but in practice -- I've used Sage, for Firefox -- it's worthless for me. The formatting and stuff is useless, and I have to go check anyways. I check probably fifty blogs regularly as the mood strikes me, and I check them all manually. It helps that I daily use four different computers with totally different sets of bookmarks.

Nick Licata had one for ages - what happened to it? I think he had one long before any of the others did.

@8 Thank you Tim Burgess staffer. Can you be anymore obvious?

Why? Why should councilmembers have blogs? can't they just do their work like we elect them to? Isn't email and TV enough?

@14: Dead on. So, Erica, you forgot to mention exactly why every Council member needs to have a blog. To make your job easier, right?

Fnarf wrote:

I hate RSS. I like the idea of it, but in practice -- I've used Sage, for Firefox -- it's worthless for me. The formatting and stuff is useless

That's like saying you hate HTML after using one particular Web browser that did not render the content well.

NetNewsWire is probably the best feed reader available today. It's Mac-only. I've heard Safari's built-in is pretty good. I also use Akgregator on GNU/Linux. I've no experience or need for Windows feed readers. On the Web, Google's is probablby pretty good. It's at google.com/reader.

Reading blogs with a Web browser is slow and cumbersome. With a feed reader, I have three columns: one lists feeds, the next lists posts for the selected feed, the next shows content of the selected feed. Having one interface for all the blogs I read is nice.

Erica is right about this.

Now I can hit on Tim Burgess. Kind of.

Reading blogs with a browser isn't slow; what's slow is loading images, but that's what I'm there for. Exactly 0% of my frustration with blogs is because of the interface. I LIKE the way I do it. What you describe sounds like I wouldn't like it. I LIKE having every blog in its own universe.

Suit yourself, though.

Yeah, OK, the Google Reader is pukeworthy. Totally worthless for what I use blogs for. I'm looking at Slog, and it sucks goiter. Where's the comments? Oh, yeah, you can open up the individual item, but, unlike opening them from the main Slog page, it can't remember my details. I'm supposed to type them in from scratch 100 times a day? I don't think so.

This is in fact the same problem I had with Sage. And it's UGLY, like all of Google.

I have all my regular blogs in a tab in Firefox. I consider RSS totally unnecessary. But hey, if people like it, fine.

Oh, don't get me started on tabs. I need a key to bounce between windows, like Alt+Tab. Can't do that in tabs. I wish.

Oh, God, I am the world's biggest asshole.

Ctrl-tab switches between tabs.

Never mind!