An example of citizen activist blogging: The Philadelphia city elections

I'm going to be on a blogger panel in a couple of hours, at an American Majority training session for citizen activists. I have several points to communicate about the role blogging can play in local activism; this recent post by my blogpal Tania Gail about the Philadelphia city elections illustrates several of them.

She attended a Tea Party-sponsored forum for Republican candidates for mayor and at-large city council. She took video with her iPhone and posted a couple of excerpts, but she also provided a text summary of the event, along with some context for understanding why these elections matter and why the GOP is in such bad shape in Philadelphia.

If you're going to a candidate forum or a board meeting of a municipal authority, why not take some video and share it with those who couldn't be there? If you're smart about the use of descriptive text, tags, titles, labels, and categories, your blog entry can help those using a search engine to learn about a specific candidate or election.

(I was interested to learn how their partisan at-large system works. Parties nominate up to five candidates; the top seven vote-getters in the general election are seated, except that a maximum of five seats can go to any party. That system would seem to benefit the mushiest, go-along-to-get-along Republicans and hurt those who would challenge business as usual. The best hope for reformers would be to ensure that all five GOP nominees for the at-large council seats are, as Tania puts it, pitbulls.)