Blogging Tories Television is now ready for distribution. The project was certainly educational and involved assembling more than a few novel ideas. At various stages, more experienced programmers, namely Craig (and some other friends) helped this novice out.
The principle however was simple. First we took hosted flash video (Google/Youtube) and integrated it onto the Blogging Tories website. Then we created a playlist of relevant videos and offered them up to our audience. Now, we’ve packaged all of this together into two lines of code that you can copy and paste onto your blog’s sidebar (you can easily adjust the width of the plug-in).
Blogging Tories, as a collective of individualists, reaches over 50,000 people each and every day. Now, we’ve added easily integrated, readily available video and this will hopefully allow us to reach thousands more!
Do you want to participate? There are two ways.
- Get the plug-in and put it on your blog (instructions are here)
- Start making your own politically relevant videos and upload them to Google Video (Youtube integration coming soon) and then send me the Video URL.
If you are a Blogging Tory and you put the plug-in code onto your blog (near the top), I will bold your name on the blogroll for two weeks. Just drop your blog’s link in the comments section and I’ll bold your blog. If you’re not a Blogging Tory, join up!
Here is the BT-TV code if you’d like to put it on your site:
(Change 250 to whatever width (in pixels) that you’d like)
I believe that blogging is enabling people to have a greater and more meaningful level of participation in democracy. When Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided that greater transparency should exist in the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, he encouraged Canadians to watch the interview of Justice Rothstein in front of an ad-hoc judicial committee. The full video (over 3 hours) is available on demand on Blogging Tories television. An extensive Q&A session with John Tory is also featured on BT-TV. Hopefully, as this blogging medium evolves, more and more people will become connected with grassroots political processes.