By Frank Moher
The bloggers are off to a slow start at the Liberal Convention. Much talk of the red condoms being handed out, not much in the way of insight. The Globe and Mail has a veritable phalanx of digital drones on the floor, but whatever advantage they have in numbers is offset by their haiku-like style. This sort of anecdotage is typical. Note to drones: a webpage isn’t like a newspaper page. You get to write all you want. Go to town, fellas.
Meanwhile, at the Post, poor John Ivison plaintively started a little contest to see if anyone was actually listening, and, for his efforts, has so far been rewarded with exactly one reply, ignoring his contest and complaining about something else in his Post post. We’re listening, John. Talk to us.
Ivison, though, is at least trying. This morning he offers this amusing little interpretation of subversive Conservative button-tactics: “Tory spies at the convention were handing out campaign buttons on Thursday night: one reads ‘Go for Bob – Go for Broke’ and another shows a graph, an arrow heading south and the line, ‘Bob Rae – a New Direction for Canada.’ This suggests: (a) the Conservatives would like Iggy to win this thing; (b) they won’t be heartbroken if he doesn’t, because the plans to bury Bob are at an advanced stage.” Only, if the Tories are so sure they can bury Rae, why would they want Ignatieff to win?
Elsewhere at the Post, Warren “It’s All About Warren” Kinsella notes with glee that the Liberals are reading his blog (or so he’s convinced himself), and then, emboldened, puts out a call to Ken Dryden to come sign his hockey card. “This is not an endorsement,” he adds. “But it is an urgent plea.”
Note to Ken Dryden: get that “this is not an endorsement” thing in writing.
At Maclean’s, Paul Wells adopts the snarky style of of a movie geek blogging The Oscars: “What?!? She’s wearing that dress?” Meanwhile, over at CalgaryGrit, our boy reports that he “managed to score pictures with my two favourite federalists in the world – Andrew Coyne and Jean Lapierre.” This echoes Kinsella’s once-again poignant note that “I told Messrs. Wells and Coyne last night that it wouldn’t be enough for Liberal Gerard Kennedy to oppose the “nation” resolution — we federalist types needed a Tory, too.” Which begs the question: when the hell did centralists start referring to themselves as federalists?
The problem with these bloggers, of course (with perhaps the exception of Mr. Grit), is that they don’t take blogging seriously. To them it’s a lark, or a burden imposed by their editors; they save their real stuff for the printed page. That the printed page is increasingly being read only by the people who write it suggests, though, that they might want to start taking their online sideline more seriously. Either that, or start asking around at the convention for press office jobs.
