Finally: An Effective Campaign Blog

It figures that a candidate who is so tied up with blogs and blogging that Kos Himself appeared in his first TV ad would have the best entry yet in this year's crop of campaign blogs.

Go take a look. Ned Lamont for Senate Blog.

It doesn't matter if you agree with the candidate or not. This blog is doing the right things. Here's what works:

Constant posting - Five (five!) posts today--all reasonably short and easily digested. Users will be constantly checking back.

Good Content - The writing is clear and the stories are of interest to Lamont's core supporters. Remember that campaign blogs are for supporters, volunteers and others with an interest in the campaign. They tend not to be useful for undecided voters.

Comments enabled - This is recent, but smart. They look unmoderated. Nice. Commenting is easy, there's no registration.

Pictures and Video - A bit slow loading on a dial-up connection, but these sorts of media are of great use and interest to supporters. There's content here you can't get anywhere else.

Immediate Content - Today's events are posted right away, or as they happen.

Layout and Design - It's simple and effective. Lots of white space, the text is easily read, the blog is easy to navigate (so far).

Now, I'm not a huge fan of the color scheme, and I don't know how they'll be handling archiving, but by and large this is a very useful, interesting and engaging blog. We'll see if it stays active: the DeStefano blog was a great source of information for a while until it sort of petered out (it is now back). If it can keep going at this rate, other campaigns should sit up and take notice of what they're doing right.