Canadian Bullet locked and loaded
The Canadian Bullet has been running for nearly a month now. Still lots of minor tweaks to do. Still some feeds which are rendering the full text of people’s posts rather than the exerpts I am aiming for. And still the annoying Firefox flicker. But as a proof of concept these last few weeks have done their job.
A couple of interesting things: first, Canadians as compared to our American friends at The American Bullet or The American Scattergun are less prolific and far more civil. Busy Canadian bloggers are lucky if they make three posts a day. The single autho blogs at the American Bullet often hit double digits and that is not really counting Glenn Reynolds.
The level of civility is encouraging. While many Canadians will take shots at blogs on the left or the right, (or at fellow righties), the shots are seldom personal. The idea of a conversation has not been lost.
Most of all, most of the Canadian blogs are written with substantial agreement as to the underlying nature of reality. This cannot be said of the American blogs as reading Captains’ Quarters and Kos would suggest there really are alternate universes.
The underlying premise of The Canadian Bullet is that it is important for Canadians to be able to access blogs with which they do not agree. Andrew over at CanConv has adopted much the same tactic with well written pieces on various sides of various debates being run together. By aggregating, what we are trying to do is provide food for thought but also the bridges so that, in Canada at least, the divide between right/center/left and plain “out there” can be spanned.
At a practical level, one thing I find with the Bullet is that I am much more inclined to pop over and comment on a particular post than I was without it. (A mixed blessing to be sure.) (this would work even better if my code consistently provided the right links….I’m working on it.)
The other effect of aggregation is that what people write finds audiences which might never have run across their material. When I hit publish here this piece will go to my blog, The Canadian Bullet and to James Bow’s Non-Partisan Canadians. As more people begin to read aggregators the knock on effects will be significant.
Some years ago I wrote that what the Canadian blogosphere was lacking was a “linker” on the order of Instapundit. We still are. But the miracle of RSS feeds and a little bit of poking around with Wordpress has made a robot which mimics some of the aspects of a linker.
I’m hoping this will be out of beta by the Labour day weekend at which point I will send around groovy Bullet buttons to festoon your blogs with.
Written by jay on August 29th, 2005 with
2 comments.
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#1. August 31st, 2005, at 5:28 AM.
I’ll definately post a Canadian Bullet button prominently. This is a first class operation. You deserve to get alot of press for this, and popularity. I’m sure that will come.