Five years of StephenTaylor.ca

It was five years ago today that I started this blog.  I started writing on this site as a tool to compliment my nomination campaign in Kingston prior to the 2004 general election.  I wasn’t successful in that nomination campaign as my blog at the time was read by a handful of people nationally rather than a handful of people locally.  But really, nominations are won by signing up new members and turning them out to the meeting.  Who knew? Oh, the things I’ve learned in the last five years!

This blog grew from that nomination battle to cover the Conservative leadership race, to three general elections, a number of by-elections and all of the drama in between.  Political blogging was a relatively new phenomenon five years ago and I was lucky to be an early adopter of a medium that would become useful in the 2006 election and a misplaced media obsession in 2008.  In late 2004, I put together a site called Blogging Tories that brought together like-minded bloggers to form a community around right-of-centre politics.  I remember that the earliest version of the blogroll had only five blogs on it! Now the blogroll spans 300 members and is read by tens of thousands of people daily.

As the practice of self-publishing continues and evolves into new formats beyond the blog into micro-blogging formats such as twitter, more people will become involved in the national political conversation.  Blogging has also evolved on different platforms such as Facebook with Facebook Notes and micro-blogging with Facebook status updates.  Politics is a social and new media has created the potential for the dialogue between political practitioners and political stakeholders to become a real two-way conversation rather than a disjointed series of action and reaction separated by long periods of time spanning from days to weeks.

I’ve enjoyed blogging as it provides an outlet for my views and lets me connect with Canadians who either share or don’t share my perspective.  I’ve met a lot of interesting people online and offline as a result of this blog and I’ve found that most have been sincere and genuine in their respective views on how to make Canada a better place for Canadians, no matter their prescription for that outcome.

I look forward to continuing our conversation.

Four years of Blogging Tories

Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of the founding of Blogging Tories, Canada’s original political blogroll and aggregator.

I started blogging about a year before the founding of Blogging Tories shortly after the Conservative Party was founded. During the first year of this blog, I found that there was an emerging community of like-minded political junkies writing about right-of-centre politics. On December 28th, 2004 Craig Smith and I launched Blogging Tories and started hunting for other Canadian conservative bloggers to add to our community.

Since its launch with about five blogs on the blogroll, Blogging Tories has grown to over 300 blogs. I started archiving Blogging Tories blog posts on January 31st of this year. Since we started counting them 11 months ago, 25,390 blog posts have been written by Blogging Tories. On our forums, 53,123 posts have been made by our members on 3,782 topics.

Soon, I’ll be launching a new version of Blogging Tories with some added features. These will allow added layers of blog and social media integration. More details on this exciting new version will be coming soon. I expect to launch the new site early in the new year.

Thank you to our bloggers and to those that read and comment on our blogs. We’ve become the foundation of online conservative movement in Canada and we’ll continue to lead and innovate through 2009 and for years to come.

Happy New Year!