Via Obo and Anna, this little gem that demonstrates why leftists just don’t get this blogging malarky:
What is needed to get local activism-focused left blogging going properly can be summed up under the following sub-headings:
1 Costs, funding and content
We need a clear and ‘here is what we do on day one’ plan to get the right number of the right kind of people with the right kind of people on the right kind of living wage, working from pilot phase towards an ambitious but manageable target of national coverage.
My initial workings suggest that a local blog covering a population of 30-40,000 people might be able to survive on turnover of around £80,000 per year inclusive of a living wage for two staff and operational costs, but exclusive of delivery costs (see below) which will need to remain volunteer based in the short term. (As a comparator, this article suggests that Left Foot Forard is operating on a budget of about £100,000 per year.)
Dear, oh dear. There are those who have labelled this place as right wing. It isn’t, but that’s by the by; let’s run with that for a moment. How is this “right wing blog” funded? Well, I pay for the hosting – about £12 per month and I pay for my domain name which costs me a few quid every two years. In that respect, I’m like the many other right wing blogs out there – those that are actually right wing and those like this that are merely liberal/libertarian. Some advertise, some, like me, don’t. We do it because we want to. We fund it ourselves – or use a free blogging platform. We write what takes our fancy. We are successful – or not according to your perspective – because there is no organisation, no grand plan and no central funding. We are independent voices – and those, frankly, are the ones I find most worth listening to.
Still, if someone wants to pay me the best part of forty grand a year for doing it, please get in touch, but I’ll not be giving up the day job just yet.
Perhaps the most telling failure on Paul’s part is the idea that this is something that works as a consequence of central planning. Has he learned nothing from the Derek Draper train-wreck? Blogging when it works well, works because it is grass roots up, driven by an individual’s desire to communicate thoughts and ideas, not something designed by committee. Try to organise it if you will. If so, I have fifteen cats that need herding. You’d be better employed doing that, frankly.
Agreed. I’m neutral on ‘blog advertising, but where would the fun in it be if somebody, with their own agenda, were paying you to do it? Sometimes you don’t post for days because you have better things to do or there is nothing interesting happening, sometimes you rant, sometimes you tell jokes etc etc as the mood takes you, and that’s how it should be.
Game theory applied to blogging? Heard it all now.
I’m more and more of the opinion that lefties just don’t ‘get’ life.
.-= My last blog ..Britain’s Puritan Epidemic =-.
Oh well, I suppose the more time they spend blogging, the less they spend destroying what’s left of our country.
.-= My last blog .."A criminal manifesto of absolute tyranny" =-.
Typical lefties, analyse the problem to death instead of “just fucking do it”. He wants localism, pick the local issues you know about and get on with it.
On Monday evening a neighbor called to tell me that the town council had started a consultation to build a Travellers’ site in the AONB Green Belt surrounding our village. He went through the documents he had seen with me and asked for some help.
By Tuesday night I had built a blog and started pulling all the relevant documents together. Someone else did a flyer.
On Thursday I had about 12 posts explaining what was going on and 210 hits.
Tonight we had a village meeting with about half the village there.
That’s how you do localism, left or right. Not sitting on your arse whining about it not being fair that people don’t read lefty blogs.
These people really make me spit, its because of their paralysis by analysis that none of our services work despite the government confiscating more than half my salary in taxes.
PS Sorry of the rant on your blog I should keep it for my own, but this really pissed me off.
.-= My last blog ..Some people really don’t deserve a vote =-.
I don’t get it, are they trying to hit the ground running at a Guido-esque or Iain dale-esque level from scratch? Money can’t buy you that sort of following, it has to be built from the ground up. you need the contacts within the system and most of all it has to be either, interesting, fascinating or provocative or all 3. Something the blogs on the left with a few notable exceptions have so far failed to do, mostly because they all in the end look like they are parroting the party line albeit, labour or SWP.