Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Time For A Multi-Partisan Grand Unified Canadian Political Blog Aggregator?

I saw an interesting idea from Suzanne of BIG BLUE WAVE, a blog on the, shall I say, right side of the political spectrum. The idea is this: having all of the Canadian Political Blogrolls on a single page so that one could check all of the political blogs on all sides of the spectrum in one fell swoop.

However, there were legal/moral issues to doing this, expressed by Robert McClelland, administrator of Blogging Dippers, BC Blogs, and Ontario Blogs. A blogroll is a community of blogs where the bloggers have voluntarily decided to join; therefore, having one's blog appear on another blogroll involuntarily would have been a violation of that blogger's right to decide which blogroll he/she would like to participate in.

Even with the above in consideration, I still think that a Unified Multi-Partisan Blogroll is a great idea (I guess the Canadian Blog Exchange counts, but I personally find it kind of limited). The key here is, its implementation has to be done in a certain way:
  • The host website needs to be neutral. I'm not sure if I'd want the Unified Blogroll on a right-wing site, or if a right-winger would want it hosted on, say, My Blahg.
  • All of the administrators of the blogrolls need to be on board.
  • All present bloggers on the blogrolls would have to agree to having their post appear on the Unified Blogroll. I suppose all future bloggers could be informed that if they join Blogroll X, that they will appear on the Unified Blogroll.
I believe that a Unified Blogroll would be an excellent way to improve the sharing of thoughts along partisan lines. Any thoughts on this subject?


How would A Unified Blogroll Look Like?



I could see something similar to this (pathetic) example picture here. Posts would be ordered by time sent, and if possible, I'd like to see posts colour-coded depending on which blogroll it came from. Links to the blogrolls would be provided (in alphabetical order).

2 comments:

Suzanne said...

I thank you for taking up the idea.

Northern BC Dipper said...

I not sure if I'm taking up the idea, as I really don't know how to do the website coding or have any server space, but I'm trying to spread it to those who might.