The Butt Ugly Weblog

Election coming up - so are blogs

With the upcoming Finnish parliament elections, it does not really surprise me that some of the candidates are running their own weblogs (or web diaries, to be exact - I am still a bit of a purist in that matter). For example Karoliina Kaita (an old friend, incidentally) and Anneli Jäätteenmäki (our former Minister of Justice) seem to be documenting themselves for the voters.

My guess would actually be that by the time of the next election, quite a lot more of the candidates will be running a weblog. In fact, I would wager that even some of the current politicians would keep running blogs throughout their term - I would certainly subscribe to them. Seriously. That would be a real way for the politicians to publish their views without media filtering, through a direct channel to the people. I do not know really how much of a problem this is to the current politicians, but it might certainly help some of those who have been "shadowed" by their more loud or prominent colleagues.