Thursday’s vanishing post on a Minneapolis City Council member’s blog highlights the hazards of online ruminations within a face-to-face City Hall culture that hasn’t yet adapted to the ways of the Web. On Tuesday, Council Member Cam Gordon’s aide, Robin Garwood, posted a five-graf gripe on Gordon’s 2nd Ward blog that questioned the progressiveness of Council Member Ralph Remington in view of Remington’s fresh support for the city’s current lurking law and (alongside Council Member Paul Ostrow) proposed regulations on public protests.

Both issues hit the fan Wednesday at the Public Safety and Regulatory Services Committee meeting. Gordon (pictured) appeared exasperated at Remington’s full-throated fulminations on the threat of one protest group “bum-rushing” another during the Republican National Convention — unless the city starts granting permits making one group’s occupancy of public space official and enforceable. Thursday, within hours of a Minnesota Monitor mention of Garwood’s post, three or four negative responses on City Hall’s third floor had Gordon removing the post from his Blogger site, because, he tells the Minnesota Monitor, “I value my relationship with my colleagues.”

Whatever the future holds for the 2nd Ward blog following what Gordon terms its “first and biggest burp,” the Web site’s difficult birth is documented in early entries at the blog itself. Gordon — the council’s lone Green Party member, who came into office in 2006 on promises of greater openness and novel forms of constituent interactivity via the Internet — writes that he expected setting up a blog would be easy: “Someone on the Council must already be blogging, I thought. Some system must exist. Wrong.” Four months went by before his colleagues and the city attorney’s office signed off on an arm’s-length blog that could never be linked or even mentioned on official city Web pages. A required disclaimer promises a tight rein on expression. Perhaps it’s no surprise that, even as the online world explodes around them, no other council members have attempted anything like it.

Continued: Click “Read More”Citizens who were grateful to be addressed as adults by Barack Obama in his speech on race in America will find Gordon’s blog — with its long, reasoned analyses and frank assessments of political reality — good reading. Two years of blogging has created a parallel public record of Gordon’s service, a record that’s much more extensive, accessible and intimate than the narrative to be extracted from annotated agendas, video logs and newsletter pabulum.

An example: Using the search function on Gordon’s blog can quickly tell the tale of his working relationship with Remington. The two have agreed on a long list of issues, many of which fit the “progressive” agenda: voting reform, tenants’ rights, civilian police review, condo conversions, an animal circus ban and new regulations on heat in rental housing, as well as extramural items such as opposition to the Big Stone II coal plant and support for a federal Department of Peace. An earlier split (in which Remington also joined Ostrow) over a proposed ordinance on aggressive panhandling is also there for the world to read, in serial form.

Gordon’s direct approach, as it appears in black and white (and green, appropriately) at his blog, can shock even working journalists who daily fish for dish about pols and their views. His online take on a proposed alley ordinance in 2006 seemed to take aback the Strib’s Terry Collins, who labeled it “a harsh blog post” for its argument “that the ordinance will be used as ’selective enforcement’ mainly against the homeless, poor, those with mental issues and minority group members.”