The Wardman Wire

We’ve held our New Year Roundups over until everyone was back at work, and the “New Year Roundup” niche was no longer so congested. It seemed sensible given that traffic for most bloggers was down by about a third or more.

Mystic Garbo has started this morning, and Gyspy Rose Wardman will be doing about three more - blog expectations, political expectations and looking back at the best posts of 2007 on the Wardman Wire. At least a couple of these are in response to the memes I was tagged with before Christmas.

It may yet be the case that Mike the Magnificent, the Thunderdragon with a Telescope and the Man from the Manor may want to weigh in as well.

Our traffic actually went up in December, but there’s a backstory there involving:

• 20,000 page views from the friendly neighbourhood Googlebot in one weekend when I did 50 “scheduled” posts and forgot to turn off the “pinger”.
• Some Have I Got News for You webisode videos.
• A big increase in human visitors early in the month.

Commercial Break

In the meantime, I’m also looking at the possibility of doing some consultancy work (email me - mattwardman AT gmail DOT com - if you are interested). If you have any jobs where you need paid advice in most areas of internet / web and also many areas of training / organisational change / interim management, then drop me an email. Soon, I’ll be putting up a “hire me” page on the Wardman Wire with some detail of what I’ve been doing on the Internet since 1994.

On the other hand, if you are looking to have a political website built or hosted, then Mike Rouse , one of our columnists who is on hiatus while he starts a new business, is currently on a sales drive. He is offering up to £400 commission for referrals of new clients.

It’s probably fair to say that Mike has a more industrial strength hosting setup than I do, and more direct experience of Westminster. On the other hand I have been around the block a few more times than him (and done 3 or 4 dozen websites), and have significant management experience.

Mike runs a series of political websites, including John Redwood’s Diary .