BBC on poliblogs - do we need a Midlands online political community?
Posted by tomfromthepost on February 10, 2008
After a long and bibulous night out, I got up just about in time to slump on the sofa and catch the Politics Show on the telly (click link to watch it again in a slightly more hi-tech way).
Although I’d completely forgotten, I had been planning to watch it for an expected piece on political blogs in the region. It started with some silly introductory stuff about ‘internet weblogs’ and a stretched link with Lloyd George starting a riot at the Town Hall (although the footage was great).
But the majority of the clip was brief interviews with local political bloggers like Adrian Goldberg, John Hemming, Paul Uppal, politicalhackuk and of course the new “e-government minister” Tom Watson.
As a regular reader of all the above and more, it was a pleasure - of a sort - to see them in the flesh talking about what they do. Also brought it home quite how many political bloggers and commentators there are out there, even on a regional basis. Would anyone else like to see something bringing together political bloggers in the region together to make some kind of online politics community - kind of the way Created in Birmingham does for the creative communityin the city.
Does anyone know if such a thing exists? If anyone’s interested in this I’d even think of doing something myself, not that I’ve really got the ability. Just something like a collection of all the latest posts in one place would be useful for me, anyway, wondered what other people thought. I suppose the problem is the political community doesn’t exist as a whole in the same way as the creative one, too many people with differences and enmities perhaps.
Finally, has anyone got any recommendations for good West Mids political bloggers that I might have missed? Let me know.
February 10, 2008 at 2:27 pm
This is all very subjective and merely illustrates that you can’t be interested in everything but before I started Created in Birmingham I did dabble in the idea of doing a general Birmingham blog that would cover the political stuff and started exploring the pol-bloggers in the region. I was particularly interested in seeing if the blog medium could form a bridge between the intricacies of the Council and the lives of the people they’re elected to govern. One of the reasons I moved into the arts stuff, even though there was comparatively less activity going on there, was that the political stuff didn’t seem very progressive. It was divided down party lines, which I always find irritating, and very inward looking. Maybe this is the nature of the beast but I wanted something a little more friendly to play with. The idea of trying to bring this lot together struck me as No Fun. There was also a desire to show that blogging isn’t exclusively about politics, something that the news outlets seem to be happy to be ignorant of.
But I reckon it could be done. Even something as simple as a Delicious account that feeds into a blog every day (for example) would be an easy way to build a portal that gives a summary of what’s going on. The trick, I guess, would be to remain impartial while dealing with controversial issues.
And of course there’s always The Post…
February 11, 2008 at 9:47 am
…funny you should mention that Pete.
The biggest issue I am having with recruiting political bloggers in the region is that almost all willing candidates are party political and want to use the platform to simply slag off opposing parties. Whilst that can be entertaining to some, it is interaction in its most combative form and often ghettoises the subject, making it of interest only to those who are party political themselves.
We are lucky at The Post to have two very experienced, very insightful political journalists who, I hope, will start the political blog ball rolling with some more analytical pieces - Jon Walker on Westminster and Paul Dale on regional politics. I like the idea of them both having Delicious accounts…
Nothing is set in stone as yet, but it would be great if we could build a political community up from there on the new Post website.
February 11, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Well, after having a word with the web editor today, I’m going to start tagging stuff up, it’ll keep me off the streets if nothing else. I’ll switch the del.icio.us feed on this site for a politics one I think, there’s not a lot of point to that being there as it is.
Can add to it or move it onto the Post website or whatever closer to the time, if, as and when it becomes necessary.
Would still be good to hear any more suggestions for blogs to check though, always interesting to hear new suggestions…