The Wardman Wire

Hints and Tips

Some common sense tips.

A new blogger called Soho Politico left a comment on my post about the European blog rankings published by Wikio:

This is my first week of blogging, and so far I’ve had 20 people come through. I wonder how many centuries it’ll take me to get on this list at the current rate of progress!

I’ve also seen some commentary in the last few days about how the “hierarchies” of A-list bloggers are fixed with no opportunity for new voices, but blogger’s curse has struck and I can’t find it again.

Anyway, I wanted to note that that isn’t true for the Wikio rankings of political blogs, which have a number of new or relatively new sites close to the top. I should note that many people – especially if you are writing for a tightly focused community.

Wikio is currently the list which gives the most diverse, and simply defined, set of British political blogs. The rankings on links to a site included in blog RSS feeds over roughly the previous year; there is a full defintion at the end of this article.

Here are 7 sites from the current top 30 which were started since the start of 2008 and are less than 20 months old – with the date of publication of their first article.

quick note to point anyone interested in podcasting/online radio.

Donal Blaney has been doing a show on Blog Talk radio for a couple of months on and off and has done more than 20 episodes (Sidenote: What about putting your blog address in your Twitter profile?)

Now Jon Gaunt is starting at the Sun.

On the Left, we already have George Galloway who does a Talksport Show.

In the Midlands, we have the Wolverhampton Politics Show from Matt Revell.

Are any independents podcasting or doing online political radio?Is anyone on the left/centre/non-aligned doing it?

I think this has a lot of potential, and more potential for monetisation than almost any other aspect of blogging. I’ve had a couple of attempts to get it rolling myself with e.g., a trial of “Daily Papers review” podcasts for more than a month last year, but the time – roughly an hour daily – was too much.

A monthly niche listenership of around 10k should be enough to market to sponsors.

I’m coining a new phrase: Terrorist Creep.

It is defined like this:

Terrorist Creep: the extension of offences, enforcement systems and laws originally justified as “combatting terrorism” to include the general population and a wider range of offences, especially when the extension is done without a full new debate in Parliament.

I invite anybody else to use it.