Honest to blog

British Labour blogger Mike Ion writes on the Guardian's CommentIsFree about blogging. He says that the political parties need to harness the power of the internet to get their messages across:

Political blogging has become immensely popular in the UK over the past 12 months. Blogs like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale's Diary receive hundreds of thousands of hits each month and are proving to be influential in setting the news agenda ahead of the printed and broadcast media. There's no question in my mind that political bloggers are a major new development in British politics. They take the media out of the hands of the corporate world and put it into the hands of anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Their audiences tend to be political junkies who have almost non-stop access to a computer and large amounts of time to surf the internet for breaking news. This is what makes political bloggers so powerful - their ability to influence the influencers. However almost all of the popular, and populist, political blogs in the UK are both anti-government and anti-Blair. Left of centre, or even vaguely pro-government blogs are rare and not at all influential, few (if any) are read by the likes of Nick Robinson and Adam Boulton..

..Yes blogs matter and yes blogs are having an influence. Blogs are less important because of their direct effects on politics than their indirect ones - they influence important actors within mainstream media who in turn frame issues for a wider public. Blogs are therefore becoming ever more important in politics and to politicians, and are likely to remain so...