Labour blogging stats, and dodgy directories - 2 comments
Total Politics has a directory of Labour bloggers (current count 201), and given there were a few entries I didn't recognise, I wrote a tool to screen-scrape their list and submit each entry to B4L, stripping out duplicates so I could discover which blogs we didn't know about.
There turned out to be 68 "new" blogs, most of which I've since checked by hand. The results: not great. I've discovered about a dozen genuinely pro-Labour bloggers, but more than that number from the hard-left, many from sites that - while sympathetic to Labour - have never committed to backing the party, not to mention a good few that were extremely hostile.
So, while I'm impressed that Total Politics uncovered new Labour bloggers that none of us noticed, overall, their list is very poor. With about 160 valid blogs it certainly pales compared to our total of 536 hand-checked ones (with 504 working feeds).
For what it's worth, that's easily the highest total we've ever recorded. Sure, only 50% have posted within the past two months (I'll try to post some more accurate historical activity statistics over the weekend), but it's still a figure worthy of note.
Labels: Labour bloggers, statistics
![[Valid Atom]](http://www.bloggers4labour.org/images/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom feed")
2 comments so far...
Interesting. Very happy to update the details. We have a policy of deleting a blog if it hasn't been updated for 3 months. In the past I know a lot of your links have been dead by this definition. I'd be happy to update the list if you can let me know where you think our list is wrong.
I prefer to keep a record of all blogs (given that they can die at any time, and that this very blog went nearly 6 months without an update) and monitor them automatically for activity.
B4L publishes an OPML feed, listing all bloggers in a parseable form, and also allows remote submission of blogs - am happy to provide details, subject to a couple of fairly mild conditions.
AFAIK, though, Total Politics only allows manual submissions, and so the amount of work involved in keeping two sites up-to-date would be high. I don't mind helping in principle, but can't commit my time in general, especially if you already have volunteers working for you who could easily validate the sites. Probably half of your Labour blogs are famous enough not to need checking.
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