(Hat tip: Werner Patels.)

The Globe & Mail has a story up on the possibilities of the Liberal leadership courting Liberal bloggers:

Their collective audience may be a small subcommunity — nobody has a firm grip on its size and estimates range from 500 to 5,000 — but it is packed with hardcore, active Liberals. Most leadership campaigns are trying to reach them.

“There might be only 800 people in the Liberal blogosphere, but a majority of them are trying to go the convention,” said Brad Davis, the director of policy for Michael Ignatieff’s campaign.

Five months from the Dec. 2 vote at the leadership convention, it’s an audience many campaigns find too tempting to ignore. The elected delegates will not be chosen until Oct. 1, but those delegates will probably choose the winner on the convention floor. Campaigning through blogs might allow them a head start on campaigning to the delegates.

If the Liberals are getting serious about getting a grassroots infrastructure up and running, this is definitely a step in the right direction. For the next few months at least, there should be some major activity (not to mention readership growth) in this section of the Canadian blogosphere.

Should we expect to see some of this to spill into the Blogging Tories? Probably not as much as the BTers would like, mainly because a lot of us are pretty predictable about what we’d say about certain candidates. When you’ve made up your mind already, there’s no point in reading further because people already know what you’re going to say.

There is, however, an interesting trend that Campbell Clark has picked up:

Cerberus (canadiancerberus.blogspot.com), one of the bigger Liberal blogs, counts the endorsements of legitimate bloggers — those not created by campaigns — and in its June 21 tally gave Mr. Ignatieff 23, Mr. Dion and Mr. Kennedy 20 each, with four others earning five or fewer.

Mr. Volpe has none, and is often portrayed as the epitome of ugly machine politics. Reports that he recruited large numbers of supporters to join the party have been covered on Liberal blogs like news of a meteor about to strike Earth.

“Looks like we may be forming a new party on Dec. 4,” commented Jeff Jedras on his blog, A BCer in Toronto (http://bcinto.blogspot.com/2006/07/short-snarky-comments-on-recent-news.html). Paper Dynamite Online (http://dynamiteonline.blogspot.com/2006/07/why-not-raise-stakes.html) used the poster from the film Nightmare Alley to illustrate the idea, and the blogger, identified as Peter Wrightwater, vowed to tear up his membership card.

Mr. Volpe’s campaign is wary of blogging. MP Jim Karygiannis, Mr. Volpe’s national campaign co-ordinator, said one stupid comment posted on the Internet can set a campaign on the defensive for days, so he has a standing admonition for campaign workers: “Don’t blog.”

[Just a note: I've edited the passage slightly to include the actual links to the blog entries quoted.]

Now, if anyone out there knows of any genuine blog supporters of Joe Volpe (and by “genuine,” I mean “I believe Joe Volpe is capable of leading the Liberals to a majority government” — hey, there have to be some bloggers like that out there) then I’d be perfectly happy to post their URLs here, without any mockery from me (but I won’t guarantee the same from commenters).

But if Campbell Clark’s thesis is correct, then Mr. Karygiannis’ strategy is probably the wrong one to adapt. It’s not the innocuous remark to a blogger that you really have to watch out for — it’s the thoughtless remark you make elsewhere, that’s reported in the blogswarm (not to mention the other media), that will do a candidate in.

Still, it’s an opportunity the Other Side of the Blogosphere should take advantage of. Empowering the grassroots is always a good idea.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 17:28 and is filed under Blogging, Libranos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.