Does Barack Obama have his own personal campaign blog?

Okay, so U.S. Senator Barack Obama is supposed to be the new, young, "fresh face" kid on the block. So, he should be "net savvy", right? Well, maybe he isn't. Simply hiring people to do all that "net stuff" is not good enough if you are trying and need to distance yourself from the old-school politicians. Techmeme drew my attention to a blog post by A VC entitled "That's Not How You Do It Obama" that complains that:

I had high hopes for Barack Obama's net savvy. But today his campaign blew it. I heard that he announced his candidacy for President today in Springfield, IL, where Lincoln did the same thing almost 150 years ago. I decided to go see the video. I went to Obama's website and clicked on the video. Turns out it only plays in Internet Explorer. Firefox and Apple users were directed to another link that didn't work for me. That sucks.
[My emphasis.]

But, A VC does flip flop and turn around and praise Obama:

But despite all the bungles today and they made a bunch, I do think Obama's team gets the net. They just have some work to do to get it right. The Obama website is certainly a lot better than Hillary's. So is Edward's for that matter. Both Obama and Edwards have links to flickr, youtube, facebook, and myspace pages on their home page. That's smart.
[My emphasis.]

What bugs me is that so many people believe it is only "the team" that is supposed to "get the net", and there appears to be little effort to get the candidates themselves to engage in online conversations on a daily basis.

I don't expect the old-school politicians to be savvy and comfortable enough to get into "this blog thing", but if you want to be truly hard-core "net savvy", start personally posting to a personal blog.

I see something called "Community Blogs" on the Obama web site, but no sign of a personal campaign blog with posts authored by the candidate himself on a regular basis.

If Obama wants to be treated as "net savvy", he personally need to be net savvy, including a personal blog. It is not about knowledge or nice words... it is about commitment and action.

I await his (personal) reply... but I'm not holding my breath.

Maybe he simply feels that he is "too busy" to talk with us. Maybe he feels it is beneath him.

My personal advice to all of the campaigns: have your guy allocate 20 minutes of every day to doing a brief blog post. Not a full-length essay, but just a few quick thoughts about how events of that day affected him or hopes and expectations he has for the following day, or a reply to something staff may have found on some other blog. Something. Anything. But show us that he really does care what we think and actually does want to have a conversation rather than merely collect our votes.

I send that challenge not just to Obama since he is supposed to be the new-new guy, but to all of the candidates. I would love to see Hillary follow my advice, but I'm not holding my breath on that either.

-- Jack Krupansky