gatewatching

Along with his fellow pseph bloggers, Possum Comitatus made a big splash during the Federal Election campaign, and he now has a loyal, politically literate readership. Now he’s giving some more back to the Australian blogosphere.

On the weekend, he launched a companion site for his blog, the Possum Box, that he’s thrown open as a forum for anyone who’d like to make a start in political blogging. He explains it in the about section of the new blog:

The Possum Box is a spin off from the Possums Pollytics site , providing a means for both occasional political writers and new political bloggers to have their work exposed to a larger audience.

While the internet is often described as having removed the barriers to entry in the broad media space, the obscurity faced by new bloggers and occasional writers is the biggest impediment to a new media landscape where quality can be allowed to speak for itself.

This project attempts to assist in exposing new political writers to a larger audience with the hope of facilitating the underlying meritocratic powers of the internet - letting good stuff rise to the top, relatively quickly, even if only in its own niche area.

From my own experience of becoming an accidental blogger in 2007, readership grows from the charitable actions of larger established blogs in picking up the work of new people and exposing them to a larger audience. After being the beneficiary of such exposure by others and becoming an established high traffic blog in my own right, it’s only fair that I now do the same for new writers in the Australian political blogosphere - perhaps even encouraging the development of a valuable tradition in the process.

Great move, and nice to see someone recognising the lonely, difficult time people have when they’re starting out. The whole initiative is also incredibly refreshing in a space that so often seems consumed by the unlovely imperative to self-promotion. Good luck, Poss, and readers should get over to the site and see if they’d like to support it with their own pearls of wisdom. (There are two great posts there already).

(PS - My only concern is that “The Possum Box” sounds like another name for that place where one’s significant other sends one after a bout of bad behaviour - i.e. the “doghouse”. Never mind.)