Preview of the Review 2009

Well, it's that time of year again and everyone's at it in between snifters of the sherry and second helpings of pudding - yes, the end of the year is a time for reflection on the 12 months that went before.

So, count this as an hors d'heuvre ahead of the main course when we get to pull some crackers and before we slouch off under the mistletoe for a spot of canoodling!

I'll be doing a round-up of stories from the year, a review of the blogosphere, a report on the lessons learnt and I'll also be announcing several changes I'll be bringing about as I strive to make my Reading List network a better place to find out what's going on online locally.

Oh, and before I forget, I'll start off with a modestly titled "Berkshire Blog of the Year 2009 Awards" (just as soon as the latest wikio rankings are released).

Although I'm not an extravagant host I do aim to please, so if you've got any suggestions please let me know in the comments section or get in touch privately.

Why It Matters... Blog Rankings

I've been asked a couple of questions about the 'Top of the Berkshire Blogs' chart I compile. Hopefully this will provide some answers.



Blog rankings matter for the simple reason that they help bring you more visitors.

This works in two ways.

Firstly, links from other sites may drive traffic as readers click through and make a direct connection.

And secondly, search engines measure the weight and volume of links - which means with each new link your site receives the higher it will be placed in search engine queries for relevancy. And this indirectly drives traffic to your site too.

So my 'Top of the Berkshire Blogs' chart is good on a number of counts - it tracks the recent moves of local blogs up search engine rankings while helping drive members of the local network forwards in the wider online community, as well as being a fun way of gaining feedback about the performance of your site!

Now get ready for blast-off!

The Trouble With... Blogging

...is that it can really do your head in!

Well, not always, of course.

For my own part I've set myself a pretty mammoth task of writing a sort of local current affairs news journal for my Reading List, and it can often get a bit intense. So it's good to escape over here to organise a few thoughts with some discussion.

My methodology is to use the collection of local blogs I've found and use them as a sources of news, somewhere between a news agency and a news paper. It can often be a bit of a stretch to find the hook which binds all the sources together and create a narrative which readers may respond to, but when it works the effect is a fascinating insight into the life around us - and it often surprises me!

I have a few of basic types of blog posts which I use, so let me describe a couple of examples from this week.

The first is a basic 'event' story - as here: Geeks Get Organised. This takes a couple of different sources and respins their reactions to what happened, thereby showing what is happening in the wider context. So, for example, this story was about the growing use of social media and how increasing connections made by people through SM is creating a political constituency by moving people to support related issues.

But the second is a more tricky 'multi-event' story - as here: Issues Of Equality. This takes singular sources regarding different events and notes the similarity between them, and thereby attempting to show how the deeper issues affect everybody. Thus race, gender, age, income or anything can be means by which individuals or groups can be discriminated unfairly against.

The juxtaposition of generalised and more specific stories has an additional effect, creating a connection between the two of them and hinting at how the lessons learned in one area can be used positively by cross-fertilising other areas.

So in this instance the conclusion offered about the way to further equality is to enable greater communication between people who can be included among that group and enabling them to speak about the issues that matter to them.

This facet of the art of journalism is largely a matter of luck - and it can cause big headaches if you try to fit stories together too neatly.

So just occasionally more committed readers may notice I've gone AWOL for just long enough to gain a fresh perspective on how to edit everything together.

Why Use JS-Kit For Comments

This post is in response to Tim Trent, who posed a question in a comment thread.

Tim said that he felt the JS-Kit ECHO comment app does not enhance the user experience and asked why I then decided to install it.

There are several points which I need to raise in explaining an adequate answer. Firstly, installing it was not entirely necessary and the reception he (and separately Elizabeth Thomas) gave it does show it isn't universally welcomed.

However I started investigating comment apps for my Reading List newsblog as it began kicking off various discussions. These discussions took advantage of Blogger's anonymous function to make partisan attacks, but at the same time I did not want to concede defeat and impose restrictions to limit and control the conversation.

Instead I felt a more sophisticated bolt-on would be more attractive to my needs.

Blogger's main advantage as a publishing platform is that it is highly intuitive, and as the main free blogging platform it dominates the sector thereby setting the basic standard for online behaviour.

But I wanted to raise the standard on my main site to discourage petty partisan sniping, which I feel is not in the wider interests of constructive debate. Although I will accept accept anonymous comments I know the basic rule of thumb is that people are lazy and all I had to do was find a prompt which would eliminate all but the most persistent trolls and tarquins.

The main alternatives I considered installing were JS-Kit ECHO, IntenseDebate and DISQUS.

As you can see from their frontpages the difference in approach is immediately apparent: DISQUS requires a complex registration and installation procedure and IntenseDebate has numerous registration and notification verification pages. By comparison once I decided it was for me I got JS-Kit up and running on my blog in slightly less than two-and-a-half minutes.

JS-Kit offers additional functionality by providing automatic links to URLs, as well as cross-platform communication - so if you sign in with a Twitter account then your comment will also be published there.

This offers the potential to connect disparate discussions in multiple locations happening simultaneously. It's something that I've only experimented with, partly because it requires greater discipline in restraining the length of comments, but also because it is only likely to start having a significant effect as more sites install JS-Kit (interestingly Technorati has favoured it).

So far the most interesting function has been the automatic comment history. This demonstrates the benefits of identity when viewing the details of each individual commenter.

And this leads into the second big advantage of JS-Kit: the massive simplification of comment moderation. Although I tend to be opposed to any restriction on discussion I have moderated an occasional piece of spam which obviously has nothing to do with anything and I've found the comment history has enabled me to distinguish more easily between suspected and real spam.

I accept there is an issue with its' clunkiness and JS-Kit may not offer sufficient benefits to make it worthwhile for every blogger, but it does suit my purposes and I am pretty well satisfied with the results.

Now all I hope is that growing familiarity will breed trust and my visitors will find themselves more able to comment in a constructive manner.

Spice Up Your Earning Prospects Online!

The potential for hyperlocal newsblogs to attract a highly defined audience creates plenty of opportunities for targetted marketing.

Jeff Jarvis writes in the Guardian that this may offer a good economic model for the future of journalism, but Phil Szomszor is cautious about how this translates across the Atlantic while media consumption habits are limited by technology, although he also thinks those who pioneer the techniques required to make a success online will have a headstart once it does become more viable from an economic perspective.

From my point-of-view the commercial prospects of blog-journalism are still somewhat distant, but I've already started attracting some direct interest from local companies who see value in a targetted audience.

I was recently approached offering a voucher for a free burrito (to be redeemed by September 30th, ie tommorrow) by Mission Mexican Grill to help promote a new food outlet they are opening in Reading's Oracle shopping centre.

It's obviously only a very small example, but worth mentioning nonetheless as it makes it clear that my blog is a platform which can offer opportunities worth exploiting, and by extension the possibilities for new media forms to carve a profitable niche in the market.

Housekeeping and the dog which didn't bark in the night

Any readers of this blog may have noticed the slowdown in output on the main page recently. So it's worth giving you loyal few an insight into what's been going on.

Firstly I'll get my excuses in early by explaining that I've been a bit under the (surprisingly sunny) weather - not that that means I've been preferring to top up my tan rather than to neglect my keyboard!

Not in the slightest. No, I've recently discovered a range of blog resources which have uncovered an untapped treasure trove of local blogs. Previously I could only guess at the sheer scale of the online world in Berkshire and environs, but now I've got a handle on it the volume of information and opinion out there it has taken me aback somewhat.

I've suddenly discovered a hidden well of over 1,000 identifiably local blogs to this area, and the number is growing beyond my ability to count!

The prime difficulty in this is in finding an adequate method of collecting all the sources together in a single place.

Then a bigger challenge mounts its' head: how to keep track of everything in order to collate relevant information and then synthesise it into a narrative where each side of the story can be exposed.

So what I've had to do is to take a step back and look at the problem in a different way.

This page was a starting point, in that the action of writing these things down has helped me give order to my thoughts, as it has also given me space to separate them.

The task I've set myself has quickly expanded and it's clear that some major evolutionary-scale changes were required if I was to avoid losing control of it.

While this may not initially be apparent from the main entry path, the lack of activity there should be an indicator that something is up - a matter, not of what is happening, but more one of what should have happened but has not and therefore why not - just like the dog which didn't bark in the night.

So keep your eyes wide open... changes are afoot!

Editorial policy and ownership machinations

I think it's worth mentioning this post.

Andrew Rawnsley has resigned from his position overseeing PoliticsHome.

Lord Ashcroft (yes, that one - the deputy chairman of the Conservative party and billionaire from Belize who is personally funding their marginal constituency campaign, while failing to declare his tax status and expose the legality of this) has bought a 57.5% stake in a new holding company owning PoliticsHome as part of his stated intention to use the site to create a new online newspaper with a specific 'centre-right' remit.

As Editor-in-Chief of the comment aggregator (and partial inspiration for my amateur local efforts at Reading List), Andrew Rawnsley was responsible for establishing the site's credibility and overseeing the consistency of non-partisanship throughout the content it provided.

It was precisely its' non-partisan nature which made PoliticsHome an invaluable resource and respected point for information gatherers such as myself. So I am particularly unhappy about this development.


Technical resources

But more worrying is what will happen with the data resources and information bank which the organisation's online polling activities was able to develop.

I was happy to regularly take part and provide my views in the PHI5000 surveys because I had confidence that they were not being interpreted through partisan spectacles. But this has changed at the stroke of a pen signing a cheque - I will reserve judgement on them until I receive that first email, so watch this space.


Rawnsley's raw deal?

Rawnsley must be feeling royally screwed over by the co-founder of the site Stephen Shakespeare, who lured him with idealistic noises about no ideological agenda, only to build the site off the back of Rawnsley's journalistic reputation before selling it from under his feet.

The timing of the announcement suggests Rawnsley had a slice of the pie to offload and in the process did pick up some loose change in exchange for getting his fingers burnt. It clearly adds to his CV and wins him bonus points from Conservative opponents, while also freeing up additional time to take on other projects (such as taking on a larger role at The Observer).


It also provides evidence to support the assumed case that e-reputations are becoming increasingly important and online authority increasingly valuable as the online media world proliferates - reinforcing the old truism that it is much easier to destroy than to create!

So let's just put the episode down as an illustrative example of how professional and corporate worlds often work against each other.

And in pointing this out let me use this matter as a means of providing reassurance that my struggle is to provide more balance, rather than less!

-

Update: It appears prominent left-wingers are pre-empting any shift in political balance by voluntarily resigning their positions in solidarity and distancing themselves from association with Ashcroft's organisation.

Additionally, Sunder Katwala asks about the motivation for the purchase.

LibDems Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Lynne Featherstone have also responded by resigning.

Compartmentalisation and Fresh Air

As I started to think about how these questions referred back to what I was doing it with Reading List it started to become apparent to me that lumping all the different types of postings I wanted to write onto one single blog was not the way to go.

With the way my RSS feed was starting to be picked up and syndicated by various other blogs, the result was that I was beginning to recieve criticism from a variety of different angles.

Firstly I recieved some feedback from a regular visitor that announcements of what was on my mind was interrupting the flow of news and general interest stories; secondly this was forcing me to maintain a high-wire act, balancing between objectivity and subjectivity, which was increasingly unsustainable as readers began trying to identify a political bias in my writing in an attempt to discredit my efforts. And then there were those readers who were noticably put off by my unhealthily inconsistent aggressive-defensive stance.

It is certainly an enlightening experience to enter a competitive realm and discover how new entrants are viewed with suspicion by those in dominant market positions - and it made me quickly wake up to the need to address the weaknesses in my approach.

In both the local media and political marketplaces I soon became treated like an uninvited guest who arrives late to spoil the established cosy party by stealing a slice of the cake. Some unlikely alliances were forged in an attempt to squeeze me out, but I've been reassured by the loyalty of those friends I've made online that I can take my place at the table - even though it requires me to sharpen my mind and my elbows to carve out my niche.

So this blog page is part of my response. Hopefully it will enable me to 'secularise' my identity from my blogging, prevent me from doing too many things at once and thereby help me improve the quality of my writing.

There's an image which keeps coming to the front of my mind about an old-fashioned compartment in a train - the kind you can see in black-and-white films when smoking was still permitted - all claustrophobic with stale air and no space to move or breathe freely.

It feels like I've just opened the window and let some fresh air in!

Earlier Editorials

First off I'll link to my earlier considered commentaries.

The Ususal Suspects

Isn't It Amazing...

Good For Readers, Good For Reading!

House Rules For Commenting

How Free Is Your Media?

Some New Additions

Commentary or Reportage?

Welcome to the Editor's Page!

As Reading List continues to grow it's become necessary to create a space where I can write a bit about what's going on behind the scenes, and this is it!

You'll soon start to see what I'm talking about!