A State Of Neglect - organising the 5,000

So much for being in beta, here's The Beta Band:



Most of the readers arrive at Reading List's network of sites for a variety of different reasons - some come for the aggregated stories created by the, ahem, masterminds behind the organisation, others come to peruse the state of local commentary, while further groups may be attracted by the sourced information or other reasons.

So it sometimes weighs heavily that the editors may appear not be working our utmost to provide for visitors desires and demands.

Admittedly over recent weeks time online has become limited for a variety of reasons, but it has become clear that the 'new politics' where coalition has become the order of the day has changed the journalistic mindset required to approach blogging.

Almost overnight the profitable seam of stories to be written by exploiting the gaps between partisans who were in confrontation with each other dried up. The established narratives of who could be expected to attack whom and on what grounds has inexorably shifted: Labour is no longer in power, Conservatives and LibDems are now collaborating, Greens have penetrated the institutional mechanisms of officialdom.

The result has been a complete shakeup of who is conversing with whom for what reason.

And if you add into the mix the election that is now getting lost in the dust as it passes into the rear-view mirror any local bloggertariat dominated by the political opinioneers obviously has less to say for itself as well as less reason to say it.

Although the monitoring team has still been keeping our ear to the ground to discover where the movement is happening, we've also been taking this opportunity to do all the 'back office' stuff which is vital to how we work.

Recently Reading List reached the point where we could list over 5,000 locally-based or oriented blogs.

This requires some maintenance. So the more regular readers may be interested to know that we've been continuing to make steady, if slow, progress to organise them into an understandable system.

Over the course of the summer I hope to have the initial stage completed to a stage where we're happy to release access to each of the directories - not only will this provide access to a fuller list of many of the sources blogs we monitor and use, but we hope it will also become a better general resource.