“2004 sucked!” A European blogger wrote that, but who? A teenybopper in Warsaw? A high school student in Gothenburg? No, the quote is from the first post of EU Commission Vice President Margot Wallström’s weblog. Wallström has been given the important task of communicating the EU’s policies to member state’s citizens (or “making Europeans love the EU”, as The Times dryly writes). One of the EU’s paradoxes is of course that its successes are taken for granted, while negative aspects get the full attention. The EU Commission is famous for its lack of transparency, so a blogging Commissioner who promises to write all posts herself, is definitely news. So what about that debut, with its mix of serious and humorous, from tsunami victims to long lunches and the year that sucked? Sorry. I don’t think this is what we really need – leading politicians posing as the reader’s friend and giving diary-style glimpses behind the curtains. Isn’t that what TV politics has been all about since the beginning – collapsing the formal distance between citizen and elected leader, constructing a false intimacy? It doesn’t have to be cynically calculated, maybe this is what Wallström thinks the public expects from a blog. Some of the same tendencies can be observed in Norwegian Socialist Left party leader Kristin Halvorsen’s blog. In one post, Halvorsen wrote about crashing on her sofa with a pile of newspapers, then commented briefly and not very originally on how a message from Osama bin Laden might influence the US election – this is pajama blogging at its least inspired. And in the end, that’s the reason why I think this quasi-personal blogging style won’t survive long among politicians. For one, they’ll discover that it won’t attract many readers. And second, to do an effective political blog, they need to give it more attention than they have time for. After all, even Howard Dean usually leaves the posting to staffers.