Matt Yglesias, a blogger for The Atlantic, wrote a post today that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

He attended a presentation on new media given by Rep. Steve Harrelson, the House Majority Leader in Arkansas, at the DLC National Conversation. Harrelson writes a blog called Under the Dome, which just for the record, it is pretty incredible. Matt agrees, calling it (and other blogs like it):

[A] kind of fascinating development that potentially has a lot of promise for state and local officials who don't necessarily have big staffs.

Harrelson is not alone in writing online -- in Virginia, Dels. Kris Amundson and Bob Brink write a really good blog called 7 West; in Idaho, Rep. Nicole LeFavour writes a fantastic blog, which is authentic and honest in a way that I really love; and there are many others.

But often, these leaders are the exception and not the rule.

In his post, Matt describes how the state and local officials in the room were scared about the consequences of being involved online:

All anyone wanted to talk about was fear about what might go wrong on the internet. Could one of my kids write something on their Facebook page that embarrasses me? What if I become the victim of unfair attacks from anonymous people writing online? What about journalistic standards? Wither truth? The whole litany of internet-related fears.

I’d love to say that this is the reason that we developed the DLCCWeb. But in truth, we built it to counter a second set of problems -- making the Internet simple and affordable enough that all of our legislative candidates can build and update their own websites.

Encouraging the mentality to engage in online democracy is a different proposition. But we’re trying. Blog publishing is built right into DLCCWeb, along with volunteer tools, online fundraising, and social network integration. This cycle, several hundred candidates (with a whole range of technology comfort levels) are using the Internet in a way that they haven't before because of this service.

And we're doing our best to take the lessons of the Internet to heart in house and to practice what we preach on this blog.

I’d love to hear some feedback from the people who are reading this. Are we succeeding? What can we do better? Submit a comment or send me an email -- compton[at]dlcc.org.