the elections as sham and refer to the entire electoral process as 'selection'.
5.4 BLOGGERS AS POLITICAL ASPIRANTS?
It is interesting to note that for the first time in the electoral process in Nigeria, few political aspirants did use the
weblog as campaign medium to advertise themselves and their party manifestos to the electorates. Donald Duke (a
presidential aspirant) had a blog to articulate his electoral vision for the presidency but after jettisoning the presidential
dream, the blog became inaccessible. Another gubernatorial candidate in Ondo State, Olusegun Mimiko, has an active
blog for campaign and for tracking the progress of his on-going legal battle over the results of the 14 April
Gubernatorial Election. However, considering the number of candidates who contested the April 2007 elections, it can
be concluded that the weblog is not yet popular among aspirants.
5.5 BLOGGING FOR CHANGE
Many bloggers claim that their motivation for blogging the elections is because they wanted to break the retrogressive
cycle of botched elections in the nation's history. A sizeable number of bloggers did blog because they wanted the
electoral exercise to be transparent to the whole world so that the ruling government would be cautious in tampering
with the results. Another dimension to the desire for change is the need to make the electorates' votes count towards
electing credible office holders.
Lastly, to effect electoral change, there has to be innovative ways of using the weblog technology. Tobias, lists some of
them:
Create a dedicated blog, perhaps using the same open source WordPress blog tool used to create
saidia.org
Give the blog a compelling name - something like NigeriaFreeElections.org - and register and
use the domain name for the blog
Create instructions on the blog for using the same compelling name to tag relevant Nigeria
election news and content where you find it using social networking and bridge blog sites like
Global Voices, Muti, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Technorati, etc
Create feeds on the blog from the above sites to display tagged headlines, photos, videos etc
relevant to the Nigerian elections
Create a badge like this for likeminded bloggers and organizations to place on their websites to
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Convention