In the December, 2004 issue of Governing magazine, The Artful Blogger:
Blogs don’t have to be anonymous or racy. Scott Neal, the city manager of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, keeps a blog that offers readers an insider’s view of what it’s like to manage a local government. He doesn’t dish gossip the way the 4th Floor blogger did. But Neal’s blog is intensely personal, timely and insightful. On Election Day, for example, he wrote about some of the unexpected problems he had to deal with at polling places. “I try to present citizens with the kind of things we face every day,” Neal says. “This is an opportunity to put a face on the faceless bureaucrat.”…
Griff Wigley, a consultant who coaches Scott Neal on his blogging technique, says that policy wonks often have a hard time breaking out of “memo speak” in their blogs. “The key piece is the voice must sound authentic,” Wigley says. Bloggers don’t need to be technologically savvy, according to Wigley, but they do need to devote a little time to blogging almost every day. That keeps material on the Web site fresh and keeps readers–if there are any–coming back for more. “It’s this near real-time window into your world that makes blogs compelling,” Wigley says.
12/1 update: The preview text of the article is online in their “glimpses” format but not yet the in formatted version.
