What’s wrong with LabourList?

By Peter Beckett

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of the progressive left having its own blogging platform. LabourList has come in to fill a void that should never have been there in the first place – and I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed from day one.

Now it’s been around a few months, it’s probably a good time to take stock and look at how we can improve the site and reach a wider audience. It’s not much fun when you’re just preaching to the converted. And I hope my experiences as founder and director of The Social Media Forum can help.

Most blogs that have had continued success give the reader a little more than big blocks of text – there’s all sorts of content to get your teeth into. Block text with the odd image of dubious relevance is the staple diet of the dead tree press, but readers expect more when it comes to online.

Unless you’re Robert Peston and you happen to know that Lloyds is about to buy HBOS, a little embedded video can go a long way. In fact, even Robert Peston uses embedded video – as those who clicked that link will have realised. Look – here’s one now:

LiveList is a start, but we need to get to a situation where posts without embedded content in the body are the exception rather than the rule.

Linking is another issue. One of the great advantages of blogs over other media is the links in the text a reader can use to learn more about a particular issue that is mentioned – and yet there are too many posts here that have no links in the body whatsoever.

But my main concern is that, rather than make any attempt at restraint, many posts are a lot of spleen venting or Tory bashing without any new information or even, in many cases, a fully cohesive argument. Too many posts end by saying ‘…we have difficult questions to answer’ or with a call for a ‘public debate’.

I’m sure we’re all intelligent people with opinions of our own, and we shouldn’t be afraid to articulate them clearly without feeling the need to justify them in minute detail. We need more brave and controversial expressions of opinion, like Mary Honeyball’s post on religion being a ‘personal eccentricity’– and if it’s debate you’re after, what better way to get it going.

And sometimes, less is more. You don’t need to write 500 words or more to be worthy of publication here. An interesting find on YouTube or a sarcastic remark on what one of the quasi-nutters to the right of Genghis Khan have put on their blog can be just as insightful and clever as an essay on how to eradicate global poverty.

I hope I haven’t offended anyone, but I probably have, and I can live with that. I want this portal to be as strong as it can be so our thoughts on what a better world looks like are heard by more people. And if that means implying that some posts are rubbish in their presentation, then so be it.