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Library Of Congress Debuts Blog

Upon checking my stats for this blog a moment ago, I was a bit surprised to see the address loc.gov among those generating a small slice of the traffic for today. I've been blogging here for nearly two years now and never once have I had traffic from the Library of Congress, so I decided to follow the online trail.

I was thrilled to see where it led -- to the new Library of Congress Blog, which debuted yesterday. That is an awesome development -- and I'm not just saying that because Beltway Blogroll is one of the six blogs on the site's blogroll right now.

Here is what library blogger Matt Raymond had to say in the opening entry:

The library has in its care more than 134 million items, with 22 million items online. That's a lot of content, by any measure. More and more people online are looking to blogs to help them navigate and make sense of the content that's "out there," to say nothing of the world around them. With some 71 million blogs at last count (or so says Technorati), it's a conversation an institution like the library should be a part of.

The Library of Congress was producing electronic content long before the Web even existed, so it’s fitting today that we become one of a (surprisingly) small handful of federal agencies with a bona fide blog. It's probably a bit early to come up with some sort of grand "mission statement" for this blog, but it will be in keeping with the spirit of the library's mission as a whole: "to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people, and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations."

I've already added the library's blog to my Bloglines feed, and I'm eager to see how that mission develops.

In presidential politics, meanwhile, the campaign of Arizona Sen. John McCain joined that of fellow Republican Mitt Romney in the blogosphere. They are the only two frontrunner GOP candidates that currently have campaign blogs.

Romney's five sons are doing the heavy blogging at the Five Brothers blog launched earlier this month. GOP new media expert David All shared his early impressions of the McCain campaign's blog.

CLARIFICATION: I should have said that McCain and Romney are the only two "frontrunner GOP candidates" with campaign blogs. A reader e-mailed to remind me that darkhorse candidate Mike Huckabee also has a blog -- and actually was the first GOP candidate to have one.

Posted by Danny | 04:28 PM

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