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Wings Over Scotland


Archive for the ‘navel-gazing’


The social network 163

Posted on July 05, 2013 by

It’s “Follow Friday” on Twitter (as it is every Friday). So for those of you still scared to take the plunge into this most modern of communication tools, we thought we’d put together a handy one-stop list of 50 of Scottish politics’ most significant tweeters, and see if we can get you started.

(Click the images to visit the pages.)

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New high score 28

Posted on June 01, 2013 by

Littered with bank and school holidays, and often with the first glimpse of summer luring people out of doors away from their TVs, newspapers and monitor screens, May is usually a pretty slow month in politics. (Except in election years, of course.) We’re human too, and the last 30 days saw fewer posts on Wings Over Scotland than any this year – 83 compared to the Jan-Apr average of 101.

So we’re extra-chuffed about this:

mayuv

That’s a whopping 15% increase on last month’s all-time record, and over 8,300 more unique readers. (Number of visits was also up slightly, with total pageviews marginally down as you’d expect from the decreased post count.)

As ever, thanks to everyone who makes the site worthwhile by coming here to read it. We’re taking a research day today, but no more slacking after that. There’s work to do.

Unpopular website now more widely hated 53

Posted on May 01, 2013 by

Damn. That concerted Unionist smear campaign directed at us last month really hurt.

wingslandstatsapril2013

That’s 1,233,872 pageviews in April – almost quarter of a million up on the previous high, thanks to over 10,000 new first-time readers. We’ll try to struggle on.

A surprising result 34

Posted on April 29, 2013 by

Our survey of Scottish political website readership closed last night, and the results are in. And we must admit, we really didn’t see this one coming.

pollfix

Remarkably, the winner of the poll – excellent news resource BBC Scotlandshire – was on 0 votes the day before voting closed, largely because we’d forgotten to include it. But to our surprise, in the small hours of the morning a whopping 1,011 votes arrived out of nowhere – or more specifically, according to our IP tracking, from a single building close to the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood.

When we checked, we found that it was the headquarters of a smaller and more amateurish news-reporting organisation, so we assume that lots of employees working the late shift had all decided to vote to express their admiration for a respected rival at once. (Curiously all from the same computer, and now we come to think about it, several hours after the poll had in fact closed.)

It’s quite the mystery.

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Who do you love? 103

Posted on April 24, 2013 by

Amazingly, it’s now been a whole year (plus two days) since we unexpectedly found ourselves top of a poll of most-read Scottish political blogs conducted by Scot Goes Pop. As we’ve now got a pretty sizeable readership, we thought it might be interesting to pick up the baton and conduct a similar survey for ourselves this year.

Below is a list of all the active Scottish political blogs we could think of. (We’ve been fairly liberal with the definition of “active”, hence the inclusion of LabourHame.) The criteria were pretty simple – the content of each site had to be chiefly about Scottish politics, and it had to be a proper website/blog (so we’ve excluded writers who are exclusively newspaper columnists with no site of their own, which knocked out the likes of Ian Bell, Alan Cochrane and Kevin McKenna). Facebook doesn’t cut it.

popularity

(We’ve included as many Unionist blogs/sites as we could find, but they’re remarkably thin on the ground, as we noted around the turn of the year. Even the once-tireless Councillor Alex “Braveheart” Gallagher has given up since last October.)

If you’re unfamiliar with any of the sites listed, you’ll find most of them in our links column over to the right. In the first poll (about which blogs you actually read on a regular basis in 2013) you can tick as many boxes as you like, and in the second we’d like you to choose your single favourite. Both polls close at midnight on Sunday.

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Legal correspondence 149

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

We’ve received another letter from Ian Taylor’s lawyers. You can read it below.

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A day in a million 79

Posted on April 09, 2013 by

We suppose we should thank Mrs Thatcher for giving us the last nudge over this rather special landmark, thanks to our second all-time-high pageview record in two days:

million

It seems fitting somehow.

One thousand up 186

Posted on April 02, 2013 by

So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.

cybergnats

In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.

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The sincerest form of flattery 193

Posted on April 02, 2013 by

When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.

Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.

There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.

spiff

We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?

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Time-travel trauma 39

Posted on March 29, 2013 by

Frighteningly, Wings Over Scotland is fast approaching its 1,000th post (likely to happen sometime next week). Sometimes, for unknown reasons, someone will tweet a link to an old story I’d forgotten I’d written, and I’ll click to see what it was and get enraged as if I’d never seen it before and was just discovering it now.

Today was one of those days.

A gap in the market 92

Posted on March 26, 2013 by

So. Wow. Where to start? Lead with the number, we suppose.

hamishquid

Did we say “Wow” yet?

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Reach for the stars 38

Posted on March 02, 2013 by

Wings Over Scotland readership stats for February. Click to size-up.

wingslandviews-feb2013

Bullet points below for fans of blatant self-aggrandisement.

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    Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)

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    • Mark Beggan on The thickness of blood: “Well done NHS Fife. There goes another 100,000 votes and not a Reform candidate in sight. Reform are getting their…Feb 18, 21:09
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    • Mark Beggan on The thickness of blood: “Put me off dentists for years.Feb 18, 20:21
    • George Ferguson on The thickness of blood: “Anyway back to the matter in hand. Sandy Peggie will win the industrial tribunal because their deliberations will be based…Feb 18, 20:07
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    • Marie on The thickness of blood: “Someone (can’t remember who) used the term “petty venom “ on this thread earlier – petty venom on show right…Feb 18, 18:07
    • TURABDIN on The thickness of blood: “ARC i.e alliance for responsible citizenship currently conferencing in east London at a venue owned and operated by an Abu…Feb 18, 17:22
    • George Ferguson on The thickness of blood: “OK I seem to be clear now. Hopefully the same for other wingers. But be cautious I have just realised…Feb 18, 17:17
    • George Ferguson on The thickness of blood: “New malware. Red lettered signal saying download this on your PC.Feb 18, 16:44
    • George Ferguson on The thickness of blood: “I will try this. Dave Narey and Paul Hegarty were a better central duo than Willie Miller and Alex McLeish.Feb 18, 16:30
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    • gregor on For Mridul And Sandy: “The National @ScotNational: “It’s 51 years since the McCrone Report detailed Scotland’s incredible oil wealth – yet Scotland has some of…Feb 18, 10:54
    • Hatey McHateface on The thickness of blood: “Je suis gregor!!! (Note capitalisation – these details matter 🙂 )Feb 18, 10:01
    • gregor on The thickness of blood: “BBC (18/02/25): Review of school sex survey to be published: “The Scottish government’s Health and Wellbeing census first hit the…Feb 18, 09:53
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    • Young Lochinvar on The thickness of blood: “? True, but then again I always reckoned Glasgow looked best in the rear view mirror. Face it; the bulk…Feb 18, 03:04
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    • twathater on The thickness of blood: “Geoff if these arsewipes continue with their disciplinary procedure on Friday and SP’s lawyers are forced to go to court…Feb 17, 17:15
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