Thanks, Augustus Carp

In response to a pseudonymous contact I've spent the past couple of evenings organising the blogroll which comprises my local Reading List.

I've decided that the best way to split them up is along into three main groups along the following lines:

Main feeds, offering a wider perspective

• News feeds (for news sources)
• Magazine feeds (for blogs with a clear voice and format within a narrow interest range)
• Humourous feeds (for the funny side of life)

Political feeds, offering subjective viewpoints

• Elected representatives and professional commentators
• Local politics with a partisan bent
• General social comment

and general bloggers, for an eclectic alternative variety.

• Top blogs
• 'Better' blogs
• Ones to watch

These and other blogs will remain listed on my main directory lists, which I'll get around to including in due course.

Many sites don't fit neatly into one or other category, so at least for the purpose of presenting a clear range and balance these changes will help. Hopefully, too, any writers who see where their blog fits into the spectrum of the Berkshire blogosphere will find this a useful form of feedback providing some hints for them to refine their own style and focus, and that this will sharpen up the overall tenor of expression.

There's something distinctly unfair about determining the rightful prominance to give local writers, and this created a bit of a conundrum which gave me a few headaches. But despite these awkward choices it's necessary nonetheless and hopefully worthwhile.


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For those of you of a bookish nature Augustus Carp was a satire about a self-important nobody, and the in undertaking this task the reflexive irony of my interlocutor's intervention gradually dawned on me...

Thanks, Augustus Carp!

Reading List relaunches

Thanks to all the supporters and well-wishers who've got in touch to ask whether Reading List would be consigned into the nether yonder of the internet.

I'm happy to announce that after some (much-discussed) changes the blog will resume postings (albeit in an initially scaled-down form).

As a purely voluntary effort, Oranjepan was struggling to find enough hours in the day to properly maintain and monitor the 5,000+ source sites and feeds which comprise the collected 'list', let alone produce a satisfactory digest and manage a full private life at the same time!

Reading List depends on you, so if you have any comments on articles, feedback on style and possible topics, or suggestions for sources to add to the list please get in contact.

Why it matters... voting

It would be easy to roll out a lengthy diatribe on this, talking about how it's your taxes, your life and your future which is at stake. Or I could mention how millions of people have fought and died for the privilege which many people still don't have.

But I think humour says it better than I could, for which I'm indebted to Cookham's Dave Walker who also writes for the Church Times blog.


Succinct and to the point.

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More Why it matters...

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.

An Online Bill Of Rights

Jeff Jarvis sets out his 9 articles to be included in a putative online Bill of Rights.

They are:

• We have the right to connect.
• We have the right to speak.
• We have the right to speak in our languages.
• We have the right to assemble.
• We have the right to act.
• We have the right to control our data.
• We have the right to our own identity.
• What is public is a public good.
• The internet shall be built and operated openly.

In the main they are simply an extension of what we already expect from society, but in the way they govern online behaviour there is a principle at stake here which has previously been devolved to governments out of practicality: the principle of self-determination.

Now I know there is a lot of debate online about the validity of state intervention, and even of the legitimacy of the state itself (Thatcherism vs New Labour principles), but it cannot be overstated how cyberspace is changing the way we interact - not only with the state and other people, but within our own lives too.

The representative democracy that has been in force for the past few centuries is facing a huge challenge from the simple ability to sit down at a computer terminal and do for ourselves what we've previously depended on other people to do: when we wanted to learn something there came wikipedia; when we wanted to find something, google was at hand; when we wanted to connect with others there was facebook; when we wanted to talk to people there was twitter.

Political institutions are increasingly under threat as these new technologies are unearthing bad practises and spreading the details, but this wonderous pioneering phase of the technological evolution we see before us remains only a phase.

The mass of valuable information is dispersed so widely that the time wasted weeding it out from among the piles of opinion and the signposts which (may or may not) direct us to where we want to go is almost too much for even the sharpest wizard in the school. Just like a sat-nav makes life easier it creates a form of co-dependency where we are forced to trust the advice even if it is heading us into an abyss. The ability to orientate ourselves with maps and environmental awareness is being lost: the commuter has become a slave to the radio travel update.

So an e-rights bill is not only essential in assuring against the abuse of convenience, but it also provides a new role for the state in securing our rights as their guarantor.

As I read around it becomes pretty clear that this has far-reaching and profound impact. For example Ben Goldacre's ongoing battle to establish a higher standard on linkage at BBC online [1, 2]. Online Journalism Blog covers the debate [pt1, pt2, pt3].

The BBC holds an important position here at the central of the maelstrom as the only real institution with the capability to lead by example. So it's interesting to read their response with the development of a new policy in communication with readers.

I was particularly struck by the comment: "Our role as an archive and resource is becoming as important to many of you as the more traditional role of reporting the latest news headlines."

Locally to me here we have the BBC Monitoring site in Caversham, which provides an invisible backbone to the corporation. This has enabled it to understand the context of what's going on and thereby gives it's journalists the ability to ask better questions of the people in authoratitive positions who are interviewed by its' journalists and write more relevant copy.

As more citizen journalists begin to chip away at the stern facade of recalitrant authority in their own small ways (such as I do for my Reading List) it is becomes increasingly clear that the people who contextualise rather than simply opinionate begin to position themselves at the head of a new online heirarchy.

I can tell simply by the growing number of people who are searching my archive to discover who has said what in the run up to the current election that my site is not simply a space where readers want to know that the story of today is, but that more want to find out what has been said on particular issues close to their hearts.

So the blogosphere is maturing to become a place where the weblogue is beginning to curate collected knowledge and the curators of that knowledge are showing they have greater staying power than the angry chatterers requiring immediate responses (who are largely migrating away from blogs anyway).

Media loves to hype up the influence of different media forms on elections, but it seems to me as the blogosphere gradually organises itself that its deeper influence is only set to grow.

But this influence depends entirely upon the ability to abide by a set of principles covering the provision of accurate and well-informed information. So, whether or not any online Bill of Rights gains official recognition, the blogger who hopes to continue to grow their audience must abide by some self-imposed standards.

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Update: Neville Hobson draws some focus to the benchmark set regarding blogging standards of accuracy following the PPC's upholding of a complaint against The Spectator columnist, Rod Liddle's unsustantiated claims on crime levels in London.

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Cross-posted from Not Yet Out Of The Woods