Welcome to the blog!

Why blog? As politicians, we are consistently urged to do more to encourage people to participate in politics. Often this takes the form of suggestions that we need to engage more with the new technologies. Let people text their votes in, for example. This will, apparently, attract more young people into political engagement. (Just as journalists leaving off their ties on Sunday political programmes will encourage more young people to watch, apparently. Hmm...)

Well, I'm sceptical about gimmicks in politics or in the media. There's no evidence that trendy vicars build bigger congregations. The reasons why voter participation is declining are complex.(See http://www.vanishingvoter.org.) There's part of me that suspects that far from driving up political interest, a blog will simply attract the already committed. I may be about to cause political grief for myself or attract lawsuits. We'll see.

But I think we do have a responsibility as politicians to draw people into civic debate. So I'm willing to give it a go. And blogs are clearly catching on fast. (That reference comes courtesy of the weblog of the journalist Andrew Sullivan.) The purpose of this blog, however, is not to duplicate vehicles that are open to me anyway. So this is not intended to be like my website (http://www.leightonandrews.net/, since you ask), my Rhondda Leader column, articles I might write for Welsh newspapers or magazines, speeches I might give in the National Assembly, or more academic articles and lectures.

It's also important to dismiss the myth that weblogs are diaries in real-time. They are not. Diaries are private - though some are more self-conscious than others and may be intended for publication later. But the crucial thing is that they are intended for publication later, whereas weblogs are more immediate. But weblogs, unlike private unpublished diaries, are subject to the law of defamation, and to self-censorship (read political self-preservation!).

Labour MP Clive Soley has a good summary of why he blogs. I hope my blog will be informal, human and humorous. But that's also down to those who choose to interact with it - if any! Over to you.

For anyone contemplating blogging, before settling on http://www.blogger.com I checked out other blogging formats. Clive Soley MP uses http://www.typepad.com which has some good templates but you have to pay for this, so it's probably only worth using after you have built up a blog. I didn't like the http://www.bloglines.com format. Microsoft's new http://spaces.msn.com gave too much of a Microsoft corporate feel for me, though it's easy to set up.