Friday, July 30, 2010

Food for Thought

Given all of the political flack that I have received from three members of the Select Board about the Longmeadow Buzz blog and the links to it from the town website, it's interesting that the State of Massachusetts allows a link to following blog from the homepage of the official State website.
 
At Issue and InFocus- The Official Blog of the Massachusetts Attorney General- Martha Coakley http://blog.ago.state.ma.us/blog/

Guidelines from the front page of this state sponsored and approved blog include...

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I would expect that the Massachusetts AGO would probably have moderated (censored) many (if not all) of Jerold Duquette's posts that have appeared on LongmeadowBuzz for objectionable content if they had been submitted to the state sponsored AGO blog.
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As Alex Grant pointed out in his Opinion column (Payback in Town Politics) published in this week's edition of the Longmeadow News, the LongmeadowBuzz blog was not the town website.  He doubted that anyone was mislead to believe that the town website and the Buzz blog were one and the same thing.
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The fact of the matter is that there obviously needs to be some guidelines for the town website about acceptable links.  The State of Massachusetts must approve of the above AGO's blog link because there is a prominent link to it on the official state website (see link at top right hand side on www.mass.gov, Connecting with Us).

No specific guidelines for content or links have ever been formally established for the Longmeadow town website

However, the existence of links from the "official" town website to the Buzz blog for over two years without objection would appear to be implicit approval by the Select Board.  As mentioned in a previous post there had been no request from the Select Board for removal of the LongmeadowBuzz link until July 14, 2010 and it was quickly removed without objection.

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