I had to add a new site meter to this site as the old one went kaput for some reason. Nonetheless visitations here were moving up into the few hundreds daily within the first four weeks of its web presence.
So the project was more successful earlier than I had expected. We nonetheless have to encourage more 'team members' to post here but the problem you see, is that they have their own blogging families elsewhere and I know it is so hard to blog in two places at once.
So we've tried to accommodate to that by encouraging a lot of networking and cross interest by referring you to interesting posts and worthy discussions that are housed on our partners' blogging sites.
We are, you see, not alone.
In this regard you may want to trial a subscription to the Left Blogroll (bottom of the right margin) we've put together. That way you get the good stuff across a spectrum of our preferred lefty bloggers. Later you can put your own subscriptions together through the experience by culling and selecting what you like from this sampler list on offer.
Multimedia
As you see we've been keen on multimedia. We do this with the presumption that we can harness and package it better and more often than a lot of other news or blogging sites --and certainly much better than email lists can.
Once we get back into a regular Ratbag Radio routine this site will work a bit more as a RR Network adjunct by showcasing more locally generated audio -- video too. Let's just say, that plans do exist.
So if you come upon some great media stuff elsewhere that you w ant to let this here milieu in cyberspace know about, please let LeftClick know. I think sharing text is better served on formats like elists which can function as aggregators of all the news that fits. Whereas here for the moment the only selectivity in active play is media aside from text published elsewhere.
The other great advantage we've exploited is the label recourse on offer here as the site can aggregate content that way into themes and threads which can have standalone interest. It's sometimes very useful to refer people to a labels than single posts or the whole blog. So the site consciously archives.
This also means that when we campaign -- which I hope we do, around some issues -- like for example as we have over indigenous rights, Farooq Tariq's detention, the QUT witch hunt, and the Venezuelan revolutionary process (of course!)... we can create focus niches that can be very useful for activists long term.
Green Left Weekly
While a project like this may have its uses and potential, a core fact of its existence is that it shares cyberspace with Green Left Weekly. What that means is that LeftClick isn't a lone 'citizen journalism' enterprise, because we are not alone. GLW exists and keeps pumping out so much more of the stuff that would concern us here. So, in a very real self defined sense, LeftClick is a supplement to that important exercise. It is not a GLW project, but one that nonetheless is very much aware of the important role Green Left Weekly plays on (and off) the web and how important and indispensable a political asset it is.So we don't intend to blithely ignore GLW as so many locally based blogging projects do.
There's this rigid pre-determinism it seems where blogs are supposedly genetically separate from enterprises like GLW and that cross fertilisation is uncalled for. Since I write and edit stuff for Green Left often enough, I don't share that outlook at all. But I do note, and hope to address, the conundrum that blogs are posted to any time of the day or night,regardless of week or day -- but Green Left is scheduled to web publish once per week in a Sunday night upload of all its weekly goods.
So I think blogs -- and not just this one -- can supplement that schedule containment by filling in the gaps in regard to daily news gathering and by extending both the opinion and discourse. We can do that by exploring some issues through investing them with more detail and by encouraging discussion and debate.
This is of course what the GLW discussion list offers but debates there are so very hard to access and archive unless they are occurring when you go looking for them. Elist posts have a short shelf life. But if anything is cooking on the Green Left discussion list we think you need to join -- then we'll let you know.
Nonetheless, the "left" is still a newbie to blogging. despite the existence of some left blogs that can boast four PLUS years of existence -- blogging and cruising blogs is still a novel activity for socialistically left folk at least here in Australia. We may love our Yahoo egroups' chit chat and sharing -- but blogging is something else again.
So that's LeftClick's context.
