It was no secret that Derek Draper was launching a new site aimed at strengthening Labour’s online army in the war of the blogs. A meeting was organised a few weeks ago by Draper for a bunch of Labour people to hear what Blue State Digital, the online strategy firm behind Obama’s online campaign, had to say about a new Labour online offensive to challenge the current Tory hegemony over the UK political blogosphere.
In principle Draper’s idea is a good one just not too original. As I have blogged before (here), the issue is that the Labour blogosphere already has too many ‘gateways’ and what it really needs is to provide one that really stands out, a Labour ‘ConservativeHome’. We have got Bloggers4Labour, LabourHome and now LabourList, all of them aiming to be a home for the netroots (and this is only after a similar site, Labour Outlook, was closed down). What this achieves it that none of them are ever going to get on their own the levels of traffic that Tim Montgomerie’s site has. If Draper wants to really create a genuine Labour netroot hub he should be talking to these other sites and propose a merger which can create a truly independent gateway. At the time of my previous post on this issue Bloggers4Labour was up for a chat on this, so there could be room for at least a discussion on this.
[...] this overview yesterday. Finally, from the world of existing bloggers, Forgesian Thinking had the following to say on the matter whilst Will Parbury a couple of weeks back was unable to resist the temptation to take with one [...]