I have finally got round to reading the Hansard Society’s report on political blogging. While it doesn’t come up with any earth-shattering insights or theory, it does neatly sum up the state of the art, and also assesses the impacts political blogs currently have.

The most imporant part is when they ask randomly-selected members of the public to read and assess a particular weblog for two weeks. Deflating the blog revolution mood slightly, it turned out that nearly all of the people they asked to read political blogs said they would not carry on reading them after the trial finished.

The report emphasises how important the comments section of blogs are, and focuses on this as a way of bringing about valuable feedback to MPs and councillors who blog. While this is true, I think that the comment system is not a sustainable one - comments are unthreaded and there is no control over signal/noise ratio. Plus, in many cases (I know for a fact in my case), the blogger has simply not enough time to respond to all of the comments.

While the report focused on politicians and organisations blogging, and the impact it has on communication from representatives to ordinary people, there was little on blogs that work the other way. What would have been interesting was not to get ordinary people to read blogs, but to find individuals or local campaigns who wanted to make themselves heard to make blogs. It would have been interesting to see how the medium worked for such small, isolated, voices, and whether blogs were a tool not just for getting the message across, but also for finding and linking up with like-minded people in other parts of the nation (or indeed, the world). But then that’s not strictly the Hansard society’s remit, I suppose.

The best bit of the report is the afterword by Oxford’s Professor Stephen Coleman, which is a bit more insightful than the main report and has a better appreciation for the potential. The report itself rightly points out the problems with signal/noise ratio - many blogs are incoherent, badly written or just dull. But it doesn’t acknowledge the technology that can help people find the best blogs, whether it be simple blogrolling, or tools like Blogdex and Technorati - the more popular a blog is the more blogs link to it - which is a neat and elegant way of the blogosphere being able to sort wheat from chaff by itself. Coleman’s afterword is the only part that truly explores the potential of blogging over other forms of Internet communication, and the only part that’s worth reading for the theory.

Still, the main report is good for reporting the reality and practicality of political blogs, and the results from ordinary users rather than the blog elite makes for a well-timed reality check, which has implications for blogs (and not just political ones). If you’re a blogger (political or not) it’s worth reading to take that on board, before we all get too obsessed by the supposed revolution we’re spearheading.