I write about Thanet but happen to be rooted in Margate. Cheers thanks for the mention anyway.

Incidentally Thanet really does seem to be the hub local blogging, an example to the rest of the country.

Local blogging has allowed for the first time the opportunity for local politics to be discussed or written about in detail, it even has a natural balance since its such a popular medium in these parts.

One example is the “people” network, run by Northcliffe.

Do these count as hyperlocal sites for our purposes?

For me, perhaps not, since I’m especially interested in *independent* media run and controlled locally. Others may differ, so I mention it for debate.

Thanks for the visit

That is why I decided to blog in the first place all those years ago, the Corner Shop became an instrument to help hold local politicians to account. Sometimes newspapers locally take a very neutral position and there is a “gap in the market” created, we’ve found in South Tyneside that one or two local bloggers have moved into that gap, some of us have had some success in influencing political positions and decision making and some have caused mayhem and pandemonium. Can’t say it hasn’t been fun though!

Rather than rejecting a narrow ideas of politics, we should be embracing a broader one, so that everything to do with common life becomes part of the political process even if we don’t call it that.

For me that’s an agenda linked to the need to devolve and decentralise, which I covered here:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/10/10/subsidiarity-autonomy-and-occams-razor-applied-to-government/

or as a series with other authors available as a PDF booklet here:

http://www.mattwardman.com/downloads/20081018-online-symposium-devolving-england.pdf

… and I see trends to manage local debate, such as by councils publishing the news, as a more local version of a centralising tendency.

Somebody has to hold local officialdom’s feet to the fire, and that’s partly us.

As the Talk About Local project gets off the ground we’re really looking forward to seeing more hyperlocal sites that give grounded coverage of locally relevant news, history and politics – empowering communities by giving them a voice that is hard to ignore. As you say, this is often best done through a team, which gives the site more capacity and variety of voice.

We’ll be sharing this practice and providing materials far beyond the set-up stage, so supporting site managers and their teams when they find themselves using their blogs to talk about and tackle issues. Hopefully a lot more sites that engage people and encourages them to participate in politics that directly affects them will emerge.

Enough? Seriously though, with more and more newspapers hitting the dust (we’ve recently lost The Lichfield Post) more and more people will be going online to find news about their area so Wikio will be providing a very good service to those folks.

On a side note I’m happy to see us (The Lichfield Blog) dominating a Wikio search for Lichfield )