The Wardman Wire

This is an idea for a new non-partisan (or cross-party) group blog to cover Welsh Politics.

Why Now?

Most people know that I have been running a blog aggregator (politics-wales.co.uk) for a couple of years, with a combined Welsh Politics news feed at feeds.feedburner.com/politics-wales.

At present the site has a problem in that it has been auto-hacked through a weakness in the version of Wordpress used. I can clear it out, but it will take a full day to rebuild the site in another, clean, account. I can build a brand new blog in less time than that.

Since I started the site I have had the idea of a Welsh group political blog modelled roughly on the model of Slugger O Toole in Ireland, which I summarise as:

“cross-party and non-party coverage of politics and culture without being too insulting to each other”

The site has achieved a Google Pagerank of 5, which should deliver almost instant visibility on the Internet.

I am wondering if now – 1 year before a General Election – is a suitable time to move the politics-wales site over from being a pure aggregator to being a political group blog about Welsh Politics, since I can build one of those just as easily. This seems to me to be a gap in the market in commentary on Welsh Politics.

The Project

Having run a group blog for 2 years now, I think that for such a project to fly without grinding any single person into the ground it will need:

1 – Two or three people willing to be editors (or editor and deputy editor) to keep the site on the rails.

2 – A number of core contributors willing to write (or cross-post) pieces regularly.

3 – Contributors from a range of parties and none.

4 – Someone (or several someones) with a decent knowledge of Wordpress.

Perhaps it could be a good place for people to contribute who do not want to run a complete blog themselves.

What I’ll do

I’m willing to have the domain used for a group blog, and to host the site on an industrial-strength server alongside the Wardman Wire, rather than the experimental server it is on now.

Wrapping Up

I should mention that there is another group blog starting up in Welsh Politics soon with a likely (or it looks this way to me) focus on policy and analysis. So that might suggest that more of a news and comment focus with – for example – interviews might be a good place to start for politics-wales.

So, the question from this post – is anyone interested in such a project?

If you are, please drop me an email on mattwardman AT gmail DOT com, or add a comment below.

[Update: This is one idea I'm running up the flagpole; there are other possibilities including a University Politics Course or Media Organisation taking over the domain. I'm open to any ideas.]