New Year message for online community

Alex Salmond, as reported in some of the press, is the first Scottish political leader to broadcast his New Year message on You Tube. You can watch it here.

moving: step by step

In response to a couple of comments, you can have a sneak preview at the rather basic front end currently set up for the new version of "small nation" if you visit http://www.smallnation.org/drupal. As you can see there are various RSS feeds and the new site will also have our own podcast series, discussion fora, polls, membership (free) privileges and guest articles. Keep your eyes peeled in the early New Year for the "official" launch.

open democracy? open question

As you'll see from the links on the right hand side, I'm a keen fan of Open Democracy, the Web based comment and review magazine. In the predictions for the coming year, Neal Ascherson hints at the very real chance of the SNP winning the election in May, but argues that a convincing majority in an independence referendum is not necessarily probable.

Last month, Jimmy Reid, Christopher Harvie and Alasdair Gray, used the same web site to argue for independence and you can read their article here.

As for Ireland? "Teflon" Bertie, as he is becoming increasingly known, looks like he'll keep his lead in the polls. In normal circumstances one would add a rider to a sentence like that such as "unless a major scandal erupts", but if the past year is anything to go by, scandals boost his poll rating for some bizarre reason....

where are all the blogs?

On Radio Scotland today there was a curious little item about the apparent lack of Scottish political blogs compared with the situation in Westminster. I'm not sure how true that really is, perhaps its more of a lack of influence rather than a lack of actual blogs themselves. I suspect that many folk have yet to cotton on to the potential value of blogs in helping to influence (rather than just snipe on) the Scottish political cultural context. It's a bit of a two way process, though, with a bit of give and take on either side, bloggers have to decide on who their potential audience is, as much as politicians have to decide on the value of seeking wider comment from the online community.

As one of the contributors to the piece mentions, the upcoming Holyrood election will give an excellent opportunity for us to put paid to this criticism. On this humble little blog, some behind the scenes work is being done in terms of hosting, ancillary resources, and...wait for it..audio/video materials. An announcement about all of that will be posted here soon, with a launch date for the extended small nation in January 2007.