Beginnings of a blog about blogging

So I’ve touched about some embryonic plans to develop a new network of progressive minded bloggers, with environmental tendencies, so I thought I’d ask myself why, and what else is out there.

The why?
1) With or without a theory of digital memes, the blogosphere remains important as a tool to reach both the mainstream media, and digital audiences. Ideas and stories that get passed around do well on Google (do people still use other search engines – for better or worse?), and magnify the voice of the progressive agenda. Those stories and ideas eventually recruit others into a wider movement, and influence the behaviour of decision makers – through the perception of noise out there.

If there isn’t an organisation goal (campaign or comms) that this serves, then we should write one.

2) This feels like the right thing to do, and is perhaps even morally correct – which is either something Ghandi or Confucius touched upon. Giving people the tools to make their voices heard online, is a mirror of the work I’ve been doing to enable people to influence, and have a voice, within the political system by lobbying their local MP – and/or significant other local decision makers.

On a broader level society and the state, could be tasked to give everyone this power. Being a bear of limited means, I’ll start with the folk who broadly share the same world view as I.

3) If we want to engage digitally minded people in a sustained way, then there needs to be something constructive for them to do, in between short term campaign projects. This is a perennial problem offline, and here we have an open ended invite to involve people in an ongoing way, using their own initative and creativity, to contribute organically to a changing digital consciousness.

As an engagement option, this sits well of a digital ladder, or as a rock within the streams of engagement – for those who dislike ladders.

Or in one line, this is a useful thing to do, the right thing to do and the pragmatic thing to do.

To be continued

Mass Mobilisations part I

Straying a little from my original remit, another fashion seems to be the subject of mass mobilisations. The argument goes that we have tried many another tactic to create change, and to an extent they haven’t achieved,say for example a zero carbon society. So the one thing we haven’t done is to get a lot of people involved.

I guess there’s a shadow of the civil rights movement here, with powerful leaders such as Martin Luther King, or the struggle for independence under Ghandi, or perhaps closer to home the big CND marches of the ‘80s, or the large Stop the War marches.

But in UK terms what is a mass? A march of 1 million + is huge, voter turnout is higher, a big email ask is smaller and I seem to be revisiting familiar ground here.

So say one was to consider the rise and fall of the Green party. In the 1989 European elections 2,292,696 people voted Green, but then in 2004 that was down to just over 1 million. In the 2005 Westminster elections 281,780 people voted Green and I can’t find any figures for 2010 so what does this mean?

Perhaps 1 million people on the streets, is a big mass, and 250,000 is a more achievable mob. Perhaps 1 million UK citizens clicking an email link is a respectable number and the 30,000 bench mark is, all in all, a bit pathetic.

So maybe there is a comment on click-tivism here. That we ask people to do too many different clicks at the expense of one big click on something important. Maybe instead of a weekly ask, a monthly ask would generate bigger numbers, maybe there is still work to be done list building to get to the point where you can ask for 1 million click throughs.

To be continued