Six Months On - 1 comment

Bloggers4Labour is six months old today.

I think it's gone well: 115 blogs identified, lots of comments, all sorts of interesting characters met, and 24000 hits, which isn't a bad start. Hopefully our member-bloggers have benefitted too. There does seem to be a lot more activity now than in February - what do you reckon?

So how did it get started?

Well back in February, and for a while after, I ran the Hove Labour 2005 blog. I had high hopes for that, and had gone to a fair amount of trouble to get some sort of official backing for it, get it better known among the computer-literate in the CLP, and encourage its use by the CLP throughout the upcoming General Election campaign. In the end it just didn't happen, and never became the 'mass' blog it was intended to be. Not only that, it became too party-politicised towards the end, and highly negative. Bit of a shame.

I think what first got me thinking about a Labour group blog were the comments on the Hansard Society Blogging Project at Clive Soley's, in particular the comment from Leighton Andrews.

Next day, we had a pretty positive meeting at the Station pub, Hove, with Celia, James, Jonathan, Julie, Sam, and Simon, and while discussing local matters, I gave the B4L idea a bit more thought, finally setting the site up the next day.

Actually, most of the best ideas have come from others. Though I had vaguely imagined syndicating lots of blog feeds, it was a comment from Lance Knobel that really set that ball in motion. The afore-mentioned Jonathan also came up with the "newsletter" emails idea. Thanks to everyone who's helped out.

Anyway, that's enough history/self-publicism for now. Have to post about the essays before the clock strikes midnight.