It was five years ago today that I started this blog. I started writing on this site as a tool to compliment my nomination campaign in Kingston prior to the 2004 general election. I wasn’t successful in that nomination campaign as my blog at the time was read by a handful of people nationally rather than a handful of people locally. But really, nominations are won by signing up new members and turning them out to the meeting. Who knew? Oh, the things I’ve learned in the last five years!
This blog grew from that nomination battle to cover the Conservative leadership race, to three general elections, a number of by-elections and all of the drama in between. Political blogging was a relatively new phenomenon five years ago and I was lucky to be an early adopter of a medium that would become useful in the 2006 election and a misplaced media obsession in 2008. In late 2004, I put together a site called Blogging Tories that brought together like-minded bloggers to form a community around right-of-centre politics. I remember that the earliest version of the blogroll had only five blogs on it! Now the blogroll spans 300 members and is read by tens of thousands of people daily.
As the practice of self-publishing continues and evolves into new formats beyond the blog into micro-blogging formats such as twitter, more people will become involved in the national political conversation. Blogging has also evolved on different platforms such as Facebook with Facebook Notes and micro-blogging with Facebook status updates. Politics is a social and new media has created the potential for the dialogue between political practitioners and political stakeholders to become a real two-way conversation rather than a disjointed series of action and reaction separated by long periods of time spanning from days to weeks.
I’ve enjoyed blogging as it provides an outlet for my views and lets me connect with Canadians who either share or don’t share my perspective. I’ve met a lot of interesting people online and offline as a result of this blog and I’ve found that most have been sincere and genuine in their respective views on how to make Canada a better place for Canadians, no matter their prescription for that outcome.
I look forward to continuing our conversation.