For years, we social conservatives have complained about the liberal bias in the media and the lack of coverage of issues of concern to us. And so we threw up our hands and sucked it up, figuring there was nothing we could do about it.

In this day and age, we no longer have an excuse.

There is one medium that is wide open to us, but we have, so far, failed to take full advantage of.
That medium is blogging.

A blog is an internet publication that can be easily updated. Bloggers can make anything of their blogs. It can be a diary. It can be a collection of photos. But many bloggers use their blogs to publish news and commentary.
The Canadian Blogosphere is still relatively young. The number of serious political bloggers, that is, those who make a point of trying to affect opinion, is rather small, probably in the hundreds.

If social conservatives hope to make an impact on public consciousness, now is the time to take up blogging, before social liberals are so numerous, social conservative voices will be drowned out.

Just as conservative voices dominate talk radio, social conservative voices can become prominent on the internet, too.

The power of blogging is not just the medium itself, but its audience. While you may not know many people who read blogs, journalists and politicians do keep a close eye on what is said in the blogosphere. Canadians may still be only turning on to blogging, but the people who report the news and create it are definitively affected by what bloggers say. This can have an impact on the social and political climate. There has been ample evidence of this in the United States where the New York Times and ABC have both had their lies and bias revealed that reporters and editors were fired.

Blogging is easy to anyone who is computer literate. If you can operate Microsoft Word and have access to the internet (high-speed is recommended!) you can blog. There are many websites that offer free blogs. One in particular is Blogger (blogger.com). After one gets an account, one can immediately start debunking liberal myths and spreading the truth.

Once a blogger has a few posts up, the question becomes: how to build traffic.

One way to do this is to sign up one’s blog for blogrolls and aggregators. A blogroll is a list of links to blogs can be programmed to automatically update when members update their personal blogs, so that the public can easily access the most recent commentary.

An aggregator is a website that lists summaries of the members’ latest messages and a link to them. Some of the most well-known aggregators are the Blogging Tories and the Canadian Blog Exchange. A new one is designed especially for social conservatives: SoCon Blog.

When you sign up with these aggregators, you are able to have your blog messages publicized so that people can click on your blog and read what you have to say.

Those are two of the many ways that traffic can be developed. As a person becomes more familiar with blogging, he learns the strategies of other bloggers.

Well-known blogs typically publish several times a week, sometimes every day. But not all do. Sometimes bloggers will only update their sites once a week or even less. People do it when they they have time to do it and feel they have something to say.

This medium is too useful, too accessible for social conservatives to ignore. We have to develop the instinct of not waiting for other institutions, other elites, to solve our own lack of media presence. Blogging is the best opportunity social conservatives have had in decades to make an impact. We must jump at this chance to get our views known, before socially liberal bloggers become too numerous and drown us out.

If you have a crying need to get the word out about your favourite social conservative cause, and you are tired of running up against censors and the elite, who will not allow your voice to be heard, blogging is for you. The more we blog, the more we will be heard.

Suzanne Fortin publishes the blog Big Blue Wave (bigbluewave.ca).