Memo to Russ: Yay Online Communication, Boo PDF

My morning browsing reveals a treat at Senator Russell Olson's website: he's posting his Legislative "Week in Review" columns online! That's darn near blogging! Hooray!

Alas, Russ (or his web campaign staff at CommissionSoup) finds a way to make the Web slow and clunky. He posts his columns in the dreaded PDF format. You know, PDF, the file format that requires your browser to open Acrobat reader and grind along as it loads the graphic format of the original paper document.

Now PDF might—might—be acceptable if Russ's people were posting scanned images of the actual newspaper clipping. A little online scrapbooking can be cute.

But Russ's people give us plain scans or converted images of the plain Word document Russ typed for the paper. No graphics, no significant layout... in other words, nothing to justify plugging up your Internet connection with the extra kilobytes.

Russ, perhaps you should direct your CommissionSoup cronies to review these helpful guidelines for using PDFs. You could probably post those nice little columns yourself even faster with a simple blog. More accessible, more immediate... and you could take comments!

Of course, Russ at least puts something online. Gerry, Mitch: let's see some online updates!