I thought I'd try and dog out a few more Labour bloggers for my blogroll this afternoon and got very frustrated by the blogroll on the Bloggers 4 Labour (B4L) blog.
Firstly, I thought I'd check out the East Anglian bloggers. The very top blog under B4L's heading "Current bloggers" is Anne Campbell. Anne was MP for Cambridge until being kicked out by Liberal Democrat David Howarth on 5th May 2005. This happens to also be the last time she updated her blog, yet B4L list her as a "current blogger" ?
Looking down a few more on the list I came across Neil MacDonald. To be fair, he had updated his blog since Anne Campbell. He updated his blog on 7th May 2005, yes, two days after her, but nearly two years ago still.
Others that jumped out were Eynesbury Rose, lasty updated on 28th October 2006, yes only four months old. That is three of the first sven "current bloggers" who are far from current.
I know it is hard to keep tabs on who is and isn't updating their blog, but with some being two years out of date, aren't B4L overstating the number of "current" Labour bloggers ?
6 comments:
Basically we list/archive all extant Labour blogs, i.e. ones that haven't been deleted/hijacked by spammers, so the "current" reference is probably slightly misleading.
However, we do keep tabs on who is/isn't updating their blogs (in a manner of speaking), and you can see the results here. So, (currently) 99 blogs haven't been updated for 2 months. I think it's premature to call them "dead", because I can think of two that have recently returned to life after many, many months away.
For 73.6% of all blogs (actually, some blogs don't have valid/working feeds and won't be included in the calculation) to have "checked in" in the last month is pretty good, I reckon (27% in the last day alone). I concede, though, that East Anglia is a particularly weak blogging area for us, at the moment. I suspect other parties don't have the ability to produce comparable statistics for their respective blogospheres, which is a shame.
Surely a 'Labour Party not being entirely truthful with numbers' story falls into the 'dog bites man category'?
This is why on LibDemBlogs I remove blogs from the blogroll when they haven't posted for two months.
Er, shouldn't that be "Fewer Labour bloggers than Bloggers 4 Labour would have us think"?
Same difference surely ? (Unless we are being really pedantic)
Liam: (a) B4L is not an official Labour production, and (b) if anything I was "not entirely truthful" with words, not numbers.
Ryan: well, OK, but there are pros and cons. As I mentioned, two of ours very recently returned after a very long time, and given how hard it can be to track quiet bloggers down, removing all trace of them seems a little excessive. Anyway, all our figures are available to the public, so people can take their choice.
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