The Wardman Wire

One of the key benefits that came from the existence of 18 Doughty Street - whatever you thought of the overall balance (old bones that I am not interested in gnawing) - was the opportunity for political bloggers to talk and debate together, and to interact with the wider political blogosphere instantaneously.

If you like, a water cooler for political bloggers.

Cross Party Conversation

To a reasonable extent (and with all its limitations and problems), that conversation was cross-party - and recovered what (I am told) was something of the spirit of an older political blogosphere with fewer “silos”, rather than being partisan bish-bash-bosh.

Election Chatrooms

On election night Guido ran a chat room, and has now started doing them for Prime Minister’s Questions. So did Conservative Home (and I can’t find it).

Iain Dale has done a trial and is now moving into live interviews, and this evening is having a is having an Open House live chat.

Certain of the other innovations of 18 Doughty Street (of which there were a number) seem to me to have been picked up by big media, rather than feeding back into blogs. The best example is the use of video and video clips, which in my opinion is because there are no (and I mean zero) independent political blogs in this country with the resources necessary to make it happen.

Chat rooms - on the other hand - are one of the examples where we don’t need any significant resources of time, people or money.

Cover it Live

Cover it Live has provided the application used by all the examples I quote above. It has a free version, and can be installed easily.

Notionally it is an application for Live Reporting of events, but proved robust as a chat room. The only problem is that the chatroom owner can only set 10 participants to be unmoderated using the free service.

What Next?

I like

• That chat rooms are back.

I don’t like

• That so far blogs on the right are making all the running again.

I want to see

• Some Centre and Left blogs picking up on this trend, and hosting debates.
• Some real cross-spectrum debate and conversation. I think that Iain will do that, but let’s have the same thing hosted elsewhere as well.

And me?

• I’m looking at doing something, but I think that the Wardman Wire niche is probably for conversation about using blogs politically, rather than about politics; I don’t think we have the platform or profile to do - unless someone tells us something different.