The Wardman Wire

This week’s Britblog Roundup has gone down market and is over at Brassneck on the Telegraph website, and it’s come out this week at roughly the right time for once.

Today Brassneck joins the BritBlog Round up network. It’s my first go at it, so Round Up veterans, please be patient if I confound your expectations (in a bad way, that is).

It may seem strange to have a big-media blog joining the network. Have a look at Mick Fealty’s post last week “On the importance of engagement in blogging…” to understand the thinking; it is all about convergence and training journalists and the big media to pick up on the conversational aspects of blogging, in addition to the “promotional” and “informality” aspects they have already embraced. Let me quote briefly from Mick’s piece:

In my six years of running a relatively high volume blog, I’ve found that the one thing you must never forget is those most ancient rules of hospitality. The liberality of the comment zone should (but too often isn’t) circumscribed by one golden rule: the commenters should not overly presume upon generosity of the patron.

 

Like a good pub a good blog should encourage (and protect) the diversity and richness of all human conversations that pass there. And, as far as possible, having had the first word, the patron should have the grace to allow his/her commenters to have the last.

That surprisingly (to me at least) large band of journalists disgruntled with the poor quality of discourse their work inspires amongst the masses needs, (as Rory rightly counsels) to come down from the podium and be amongst the people.

It is (for the most part) a remarkably rewarding place to be.

These are the best blog stories of the week as nominated by you. Nominations for next week should be sent via email to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.