Woohoo! CDCR is blogging!

Anthony Pignataro:

Please don’t all rush there at once because we don’t want to jam up anyone’s servers, but I just wanted to tell you that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has a new website: www.cdcr.ca.gov. The new site has a Twitter feed (with 2,043 followers!), a link to their YouTube account and — this is the best part — a brand new daily news blog that comes equipped with a “blog archive” that dates back to 1996.

Of course, this is not actually a blog. Though blogs sort of existed back in 1996, the CDCR was not one of those earlier pioneers. In fact, it’s not blogging now. Rather, all they’ve done is find a new way to dump their regular old press releases, creating an exhaustive, eye-straining, mind-draining, archive of canned statements.

Now the difference between a blog post and a press release is pretty much the same as the difference between a homemade cookie and a door stopper. No, that’s not fair — a door stopper actually does something useful.

For instance, guess what the newest press release — sorry, blog post — is about? “CDCR Announces a New, More Expansive Website.”

“CDCR is dedicated to continually improving its communications efforts and providing information sharing tools wiht the public via our website,” CDCR Assistant Secretary of Communications Oscar Hidalgo says in the press — er — blog post.

When the CDCR is suddenly bragging that it’s on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, then we all need to ask if what we’re doing on those sites.