Rudd’s blog: popular but pointless

So Kevin Rudd has a blog. So what? He puts up a post about climate change and it draws hundreds and hundreds of comments. And then…Well, nothing really. Australia doesn’t actually need more online opportunities to sound off. With ABC Unleashed, News Ltd’s Punch, Crikey, of course, New Matilda, Online Opinion (no journalism please) etc, and the hundreds of actual standalone, ordinary citizen bloggers, there is now any amount of opportunities for people to vent and oh so occasionally offer an insight, a fresh perspective or even a useable policy idea. The point is – will Rudd’s blog inform policy development. That will depend on whether he or his media manipulators take a moment or two out of their busy schedules to ‘engage’. There’s been lots of criticisms of the new Rudd blog by self-annointed keepers of the blog faith (Stig, SMH), but in the end the only test is evidence of engagement. It doesn’t matter about comment policies, moderation schedules and all the rest of it. The blog will have a point if, and when, it seems to be actually influencing policy, otherwise it is just another ‘talkback meets the web’ play and god knows we’re reaching saturation point with those.