B4L, and personal posts

June 29th, 2006 - 11:38 | 5 comments

Recent comments on a few Bloggers4Labour blogs have, in particularly caustic style, suggested that B4L bloggers should not discuss anything other than politics, and discussing anything else (particularly sci-fi) makes us look pathetic. These people happen to be your basic trolls, but more polite versions would raise three issues:

The idea that discussing sci-fi / other ‘geeky’ topics is something to be ashamed of, and that others will laugh at us. I think I demonstrated my contempt for that particular theory here.
The idea that personal posts have no place on blogs ostensibly about politics. Jo has an excellent response here: “What I’m trying to say is that this is my blog about my thoughts, my opinions and my life. I just happen to be a Labour activist.”
B4L should only aggregate political posts. This, as far as I’m concerned, is entirely up to Andrew of B4L. He built the system, and can choose to aggregate whatever he likes. I like the community feel of B4L, as the inclusion of non-political posts makes it feels much more like a group of real people ~~than just political pundits~~ (edited - original phrase wasn’t really what I meant), but it’s really nothing to do with me. I’m not trying to pass the buck, I’m just saying that B4L is whatever he wants it to be. Wordpress blogs can supply category feeds, and if Andrew were to ask for a feed that only contains political posts (and I’m certain he’d be a damn sight more polite about it than random commenters) I’d be happy to supply it.

-----

5 Responses to “B4L, and personal posts”

1 Jo Jun 29th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

But what would all the blogger users do? Apart from switch to a far superior blogging platform?
2 Andrew Jun 29th, 2006 at 12:15 pm

Yeah, there is that. I’m sure there’d be a way involving text-based tags, but that could put people off…I imagine Andrew could figure something out I wasn’t particularly saying I thought that was a good idea - like I said, it’s up to Andrew.
3 Gert Jun 29th, 2006 at 12:43 pm

Thanks for your help on del.icio.us.

I guess I am one of the least ‘political’ Bloggers4Labour. I first came across his blog in the run up to the General Election when he appealed for Labour supporting people to get together. I regard myself as Labour supporting (22 years membership and 8 years a councillor…) so I signed up. I think people can usually guess from the first few lines of a post whether it’s political or not. I have never been a fan of blogs that sit and give uninformed views on newspaper headlines, like most of the US political blogs. I also avoid giving opinions on matters too close to the Govt. Dept. where I work (and is always in the news) - I don’t want a P45.

But politics is about more than simply elections, it’s about life and society, so when I write about language, or about how the mass-media tells us what to do/wear/think, or about bad customer service, I think it’s political with a small ‘p’.
4 B4L Jun 29th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

This issue gets brought up occasionally, but I agree with the post and comments here. While it’s interesting to read the political posts, it’s clear that when 200 bloggers are in political mode, that’s more p. than most people can handle. This is just one reason why we cherish the variety of topics, as well as the variety of approaches on a particular topic. Plus we’re a social network, not a think-tank or a political shopfront.

When I have thought about this in the past, using categories/tags to find the political posts did seem the most obvious way of doing it. The increase in RSS 2.0/comment-enabled feeds in the last year has made this more feasible, but even now perhaps only 20% of posts are categorised and, as our own Tags page shows, people are very specific in the categories they pick. As a result, only 18 posts in the past 5 days (out of a total of 800-1000 posts) have actually been tagged as “Politics”. I would probably have to ask bloggers nicely if they would use add a special tag (”HideFromB4L”?) rather than add lots of complex rules.

Anyway - none of this figures in my current plans: (a) I’m very happy with what people are posting, and (b) why should that bother you anyway?
5 Andrew Jun 29th, 2006 at 11:38 pm

Thanks for the reply! I’m glad you think of B4L as a social network rather than a political storefront - I hoped that was the case. It’s also a great quote to hit critical commenters with

-----

Commenting Policy: Thoughts, observations, argument, debate and all other conversational wonderments are encouraged, but personal attacks or general trolling will result in your comment being deleted and your account/IP banned. If you're nice, however, you get strawberries.