Hi all,
Just a reminder to try out the demo if you haven’t already. It’s here: http://88.208.207.94:9080/poblish2/
It won’t be fast until I can get the support I need to be able to host it properly, but it should be good enough for now.
There are currently over 13000 articles, from those of you who have signed up, plus a few others from the international blogosphere.
Thought I’d also say a few more words about the motivation for this project. The main reason is to inspire you lot to help me bring it to fruition!
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Bloggers4Labour showed, way back in 2005, that blog-aggregation allowed a kind of community of fairly like-minded bloggers to be brought together from nothing. While it created hundreds of links, friendships, and opportunities to challenge or support one another, the challenge has always been to extend this across the international political blogosphere.
There you’ll find many significant ideological, traditional, and perhaps ‘cultural’ disagreements. Many of these coincide with the boundaries of existing political parties, but many overlap. Just as within the UK Labour blogosphere, collaboration, scrutiny, and honesty can create new links, new ideas, and new agreements.
Bloggers are accustomed to blogging ‘in the dark’, unsure of who – if anyone – might be reading. While firing off posts into the ether can be cathartic, my experience tells me that bloggers want to be engaged in a greater debate, one not restricted by their own band of supporters, and the inevitable trolls. Furthermore, while party affiliations are strong in many, they’re not always limiting. Nor should they be – there is an international market for ideas, one dominated by think-tanks, journalists, etc. and from which bloggers are largely excluded. Certainly the best ones, anyway.
My suspicion is that, while many political bloggers are satisfied by a feeling that they’re serving a higher purpose, expectations of what can be achieved are very low. Expectations of what blogging software – which has barely developed in years, and is frequently crude and restrictive – can do to help political bloggers are also modest. There’s no need to accept this status-quo.
What I’m trying to show with ‘P2′ is that both connectedness and collaboration are easy, not to mention rewarding. The political blogosphere really can be brought to your doorstep; and once this becomes obvious, engaging posts start to become more exciting than narrow ones. The broken and dissatisfying world of blog comments can be replaced with something exciting and constructive.
The more blogging can move on from the ‘celebrity’ and ‘attack’ bloggers, and the more it can detach itself from the ‘churnalistic’ teats of BBC News and the online newspapers, its reputation and influence will rise, as will its responsibility.
Scrutiny of politicians – and indeed every ‘actor’ who inhabits the political world – also becomes more honest and coherent when it becomes possible to follow their actions, collected from multiple sources into a single timeline. Think of this as TheyWorkForYou (our inspiration), but extended to include all political bloggers.
