Thursday, April 02, 2009

Links and Liberal England

Charlotte Gore - who has recently moved blog addresses - gently chides some of the more prominent Lib Dem blogs for not making more of an effort to link to other blogs in the party.

I think she right to do so. Those of us who trade as a Liberal Democrat blog receive a high proportion of our readers (at least initially) because of our party label, so it is only fair to give something back by linking to other Lib Dem blogs.

Ultimately, however, the only law of blogging is "My gaff, my rules". So I thought I would give a little thought to my own policy on links.

You will see that I do link to a fair number of blogs - both "Lib Dem blogs" and "Other interesting blogs". I keep the list under review and revise it from time to time, adding good new blogs as I come across them. I shall be adding some more Lib Dem ones shortly.

To me this is one of the great pleasures of blogging: drawing attention to sites you like and want other people to enjoy too. I try to keep the number of Lib Dem and other blogs roughly in balance.

I also delete blogs from time to time. The usual cause of this is that they have not been updated from a month or more, but I will also do it if a blog stops being interesting. This can also be a pleasure occasionally: it's a little like cutting someone out of your will.

I don't use Ryan's automatic list of Lib Dem blogs (it's in the left-hand column on MKNE Political Information, for instance) because it includes a few blogs I don't like, a few that are rarely updated and many that are of purely local interest. There is nothing wrong with this last category, of course. It's just that they don't fit in with what Liberal England is about.

Finally, thanks to all the people who link to me.

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