P-blogs revisited

Some time ago I have written about why politicians should be blogging. Apparently, although the term p-blog I tried to coin has gone unnoticed (as have, probably, my posts), the very idea was brought up by other people, and by now there are real p-blogs out there.

Wiki sais: "Political blogs attracted attention because of their use by two political candidates in 2003: Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. Both gained political buzz on the Internet, and particularly among bloggers, before they were taken seriously by the establishment media as candidates. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, made the Internet a particular focus of the campaign. Both candidates stumbled in the end, but were, at one time or another, thought of as front runners for the Democratic Nomination."

Wesley Clark 'blog' is here. I *think* Dean's blog has transformed into this site, but apparently he allows his staff to post most of the time, thus making the entire point of a personal blog rather moot in my opinion. Same with Clark's, although he appears to post by himself more often. The question remains, obviously, does he really write them himself?

Here are some other interesting links I found. By all means, if you know others, please let me know:
Lists:
* Why Politicians Need Weblogs - not only does this site answer this question, but it has a list of over 20 p-blogs :)
* Links to State Legislators' Blogs and Legislatures with RSS Feeds - the title sais it all
* Blogs from local politicians - mostly local to Greensboro, wherever this is :)
* Similar, but from a place called St. Cloud (?)
If you want some specific examples, I have checked out some at random:
* Jerry Brown - past governor, now a city's (Oakland) mayor
* Cam4u - blog by Stacey Campfield, a Tennessee House Representative
* Commonwealth Conservative - by Chad Dotson, an elected Republican Commonwealth’s Attorney in Virginia
Articles/related blog entries:
* Christian Science Monitor: More politicians write blogs to bypass mainstream media
* Washington Post: Politicians Deal With Newcomer, The Blog
* 10 reasons why should a politician blog
* VoxPopuli seems to agree with me, plus it has a good historical overview of politicians on the net
* Blogs Making Baby Steps in German Politics
* Blogs for German Politicians
* Politicians Start Blogging to Bypass Mainstream Media
* See also this interesting blog entry.
* One more

And those are mostly results from 3 pages of Google search by 'blogs by politicians'...

I think that's enough to prove that the phenomenon exists. I'd also wager a guess we are seeing just a tip of the iceberg of things to come...