There is no question that a website can become a call to action. Blogs have been used as a personal soapbox since their creation. Everything from people supporting a cause to people just wanting to share their lives. Blogging is a form of expression that allows for anyone to post their thoughts and opinions even anonymously. Technorati currently watches 112.8 million blogs.

As for Concord, there are only a handful but even a handful of blogs are more than enough for people to pay attention to. Like most people I have a busy life. Between work, school, kids and grocery shopping, we have to find ways to get educated on matters that affect our lives especially when it comes to elections. Besides reading leaflets and seeing lawn signs we look of ways to understand what other peoples thoughts are as well. Sometimes that’s talking to a friend in the area to see who they favor. Sometimes it’s looking online to see what is being written outside the mainstream news agencies. The local blogs in Concord all rallied behind one accomplished group and it paid off.

I’m a blogger and I didn’t know much about the local politics until I started this site. Looking around for other blogs like mine in the area and I wanted to see what they had to say about who was going to be the best candidates for me to vote for come election day. The first blog I came across was Halfway to Concord.

This site contains a lot of content. The owner Bill puts a lot of work into this magazine style blog. Just the number of categories available and new content in each makes this one of my firsts stops in the day to see whats new in Concord as well as the State. Getting about 2,346 unique visitors a day proves they are the front runner.

Because Halfway to Concord is a must see site for Concord, who they endorse makes a large impact.

Gary Eberhart and Sherry Whitmarsh have a block smack dab in the middle where no one can miss it and Bill Shinn had a place on the header.

What makes Gary and Sherry so special?

There were other people running for the seats on the MDUSD School Board but other than some signs I passed on the road I never heard about or from them. Do candidates think that by putting their happy face on a poster is all it’s going to take to win? Maybe. What stood out for me in the MDUSD School Board elections was that there were blogs set up in DIRECT support for Eberhart and Whitmarsh on top of each of them managing their own blog. Talk about an effective campaign strategy.

The MDUSD blog averages about 300+ visits a day based on their sitemeter.  Sitemeter can’t be counted on for unique visitors but it does show how often the site is accessed. The blog has one purpose and it’s laid out in the top line.

MDUSD Information and Discussion Blog. This Blog is operated by school board members Paul Strange and Gary Eberhart and will provide a forum for discussion of happenings in MDUSD. We will celebrate the achievements that occur in MDUSD and provide an opportunity for discussion and input on matters that can be improved. All schools, sites, Parent Groups and Teachers will be provided access to the shared calendar to make event information available to the community.

Using a blog to share and discuss information is a brilliant idea for members of a School Board. I learned more than enough about the state of the MDUSD and who the players were just by reading this site. But the best part was that I was able to get additional opinions from parents who had there kids in the MDUSD.

This site is run by a mom that wants nothing more than the school system her kids attend to be the best it possibly can. Hundreds of posts about the MDUSD and her opinions make it clear that there are successes and failures within the system. They actively supported Gary and Sherry for the seats in the MDUSD. I looked for another site that may have a different side but there was none. No one thought it important to have a blog site in support of the other candidates. I believe that was another failure by them. How are people to know what your positions are unless you make them public. Gary and Sherry did this precisly and they had the support of the parents and teachers of the MDUSD.

For the most part the parents and teachers blogs supplied information relevent to the election as well as ongoing updates on events and updates in the MDUSD. I got more information from these sites that I did from any mailing list or newsletter sent out by the MDUSD itself. But if I wanted and edgier take on the Mt. Diablo School Board I would spend a few minutes on Mister Writers War on Education.

Very opinionated and never watered down. Mister Writer calls it like he sees it. Obviously he’s a writer because he expresses his thoughts online in an eloquent fashion that paints a picture of what he is trying to get across. When the school board was fined over $800,000 by the IRS, he made his opinion very clear and it seemed that only Gary Eberhart was trying to do anything about it. In his blog Mister Writer states his position on Eberhart and Whitmarsh.

I am a parent, first and foremost. Having had a good corporate job and losing that income in order to become a teacher, only to find that teachers, in this district, no more regarded than servants, were serving a master of dubious intent and merit, I decided to add my voice, with my name attached, in order to make my statement. And that statement has always been “change is needed. Fix it!”

People assume that I have always been a supporter of Gary Eberhart. Not so. Like so many people in this district who have neither the time nor the stamina to actually uncover the truth, I never use to look at board agendas, or listen to the meetings. In fact, my first (and only decent principal) told me quite frequently that sadly, to be a teacher, one needed to know the politics of education. She was right.

Based on some of his recent posts, Mister Writer may be going away. I hope it is not so. I think with his other ventures, he will never really go away but his site has been a source of information and humor for a while.

Another one of the most popular local blogs in Concord is Claycord which has information fed to the owner from numerous sources. The updated information is really what keeps people like me coming back on a regular basis.

The anonymous blogger at Claycord made no secret who they endorsed for the MDUSD. Eberhart and Whitmarsh were the subject of many posts. With the readership of Claycord, many people were educated and driven towards the right vote to make for the Mt. Diablo School Board.

Local Blogging makes a difference.

With 6 prominent local blogs all supporting the same candidates it really was easy for me to know who was going to win the seats on the MDUSD Board. After all the votes were tallied, it was obvious. Many people did other research and looked at the candidates in other ways. All the campaigning that Gary and Sherry did was amazing and I was reinforced by driving to work just about every day and seeing Gary holding his sign on a corner. Between the low tech campaigning and the high tech boost, was there really ever any question?

Local blogs can be used for many things from providing information to promotion of a group or event. I’ve been writing/blogging for a long time and I’ve seen major decisions made based on what’s written online. I have a theory that Twitter helped elect President Obama. In the next set of elections, I predict that more blogs will be created by the candidates to support their causes. I think that the support Gary Eberhart and Sherry Whitmarsh got from the local blogging community is really what helped catapult their status amung voters.

Update: Bill over at Halfway to Concord pointed something out in the comments. Besides having the support of the local blogging community in Concord, they had a Facebook support team of over 190 people as well.

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