The New York State Senate launched a new website today with the help of two erstwhile political bloggers.
Flush with social networking features, “crowdsourcing,” and open source software, the site is touted as more navigable and “citizen centric” than the previous site.
The bells and whistles are partly thanks to Brian Keeler and Phillip Anderson, two political bloggers who recently signed on to oversee the site’s development.
Keeler, the new Communications Director for Senate Democrats, is co-founder of the liberal blog The Albany Project (TAP). Anderson, the new Director of New Media Communications, still writes for TAP, and says he’ll continue to do so even in his new position.
“For obvious reasons I won’t be writing about the state legislature anymore,” he told me. “But I’ll still be there…probably be writing about congressional races.”
Anderson will also write for the Senate’s official blog, posting informational updates about legislation and opportunities for citizen involvement.
A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos said Anderson’s dual positions are a problem.
“That’s a blatant conflict of interest,” said Mark Hansen. “These are supposed to be strictly governmental websites, and they brought people in from political positions to do them. They shouldn’t be doing both roles at once.”
Democrats claim that Republicans unfairly hoarded online resources when they were in the majority, giving themselves better URL addresses and access to online petitions while leaving the Democrats in the cold.
“Quite franly they allocated resources in a very different way than we are,” Anderson says. “The people in the majority at that time had a lot more tools to play with.”
(Hansen denied that claim, arguing the Republican controlled site was cheaper and fair to both sides.)
Anderson is quick to note that his own partisan background won’t affect the functioning of the site.
“We’ve worked pretty hard at training the staffs of majority and minority offices,” he says.
Andrew Hoppin, Chief Informational Officer for the Senate, says the site developers “bent over backwards” to accomodate Republican requests.
“Anything we can do to keep this out of the realm of partisan bickering is absolutely something we’ll do,” he added.