13 Oct 2008

Guide To Online Blogging

I've just had a read of the Total Politics' Guide to Online Blogging - a little disappointing - it lists the top blogs by category: Left wing, Right wing, Liberal Democrat, Non-Aligned, MPs, Media, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Green - indeed I was delighted to be voted in at number 16 in the green section.

Of course the voting is a little bit of fun and many of the blogs not listed in the green top 20 are excellent reads - indeed see my list of blogs bottom right column on this page...anyhow back to the book....it includes articles by some key political bloggers and commentators but doesn't really say a lot and has far too many lists of blogs that could easily have been put on a web page - why someone should want pages of blog addresses beats me...

... anyhow I am not sure what I was expecting - perhaps more ideas of how to blog - yes I know that is individual - but perhaps also a bit more of a taste of the political blogging world...some of the that was covered - like the domination by right-wing blogs of the top end of the chart and Liberal Conspiracy's rejection of the idea of a top bloggers list compiled by Tory Iain Dale - this multi-author blog writes: "But Iain Dale is trying to position himself as the granddaddy of the entire British blogosphere by doing these lists and I think his editorial approach to blogging makes me hard to take that seriously." Liberal Conspiracy have a point about one blogger putting it together but now it is being done more under Total Politics.

Jim Jepps of The Daily (Maybe) - top green blogger and the only green to make the top 100 political blogs (just above Peter Hitchins and Melanie Phillips) - wrote one of the chapters and reminded me of his call to green bloggers back in 2006 to desist from using the Son of Moto layout template for their blogs - one in four green blogs were using it back then including Ruscombe Green and they all looked very much the same from the outside. Since then this blog has undergone various changes in colour and all - suggestions welcomed and yes I know I have for ages been planning to restore a better label system...ah well enough writing for now ...back to bed with my flu.....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Labels and tagging - argh! It's taken me about two years of blogging to finally twig what that is all about - for the first few months of blogging, I didn't bother with them, then when I saw other people tagged things, I thought it was something to do with search engines and started randomly tagging things with keywords from the post. Now I've finally sussed it's about enabling people to look at posts on similar topics within your own blog, I spent about 4 hours narrowing down my random hotch potch of tags from about 200 - I'm down to about 60 now I think, but should really narrow it down much further when I have chance. You live and you learn I guess!

Anonymous said...

You can do a in site google search by typing "site: *insert site's URL here*" into google preceded by the term you are looking for.

like this search for the term "vegetarian":


vegetarian site:ruscombegreen.blogspot.com


of course you can always use google tool bar...