I’ve been working on a  new website recently called They Blog For You, an aggregator of blogs by MPs. Part of the work involved in setting it up has been to try to track down all the blogs by sitting MPS.

As it happens, there aren’t all that many MPs with a blog – I could only find just over 60, which is about 10% of all the MPs in the house. That’s probably not too bad, in percentage terms – it’s a lot higher than the population in general, for example – but the depressing aspect of it was finding all the MPs’ websites that say they have a blog, but turned out not to. There’s nothing wrong with not having a blog if you don’t have time to write one, but, if you are going to have one, then there are a couple of  simple principles that you need to follow:

1. Write something, every now and then. Yes, really. A surprising number of MPs’ websites had a blog section, or a link to an external blog, but it turned out to have virtually nothing in it. In some cases, it had nothing in it at all.
2. Blogs and news are different. Far too many so-called blogs by MPs are actually nothing more than a series of press releases. Again, there’s nothing wrong with issuing press releases, but simply sticking them into WordPress doesn’t make them a blog. Press releases are written in the third party – “Fred Flintstone, MP for Bedrock North, today visited the Dinosaur Preservation Society’s headquarters…” – while blogs are written in the first person – “I visited the Dinosaur Preservation Society earlier today…” – and failing to understand the difference doesn’t make you look very sensible.

Tom Harris, one of the few MPs who really does understand what a blog is and how to use it, has written his own list of Top Ten Tips for Political Bloggers. Although aimed primarily at a Labour audience (I can’t imagine that any Conservative or Lib Dem MPs will need to be told that it’s OK to criticise the Labour party!),  but what he writes is applicable to any blogger – not just politicians.Most of the MPs who’s sites I’ve been trawling through over the past few days could certainly do with taking his advice.