Wings Over Scotland

Speaking as a professional journalist, the most flattering thing that can happen in your career is when major publishers pay you to write features. The second-best form of flattery is imitation, and at Wings Over Scotland we’re getting increasingly used to it.

Our more seasoned readers will recall examples such as the New Statesman’s enthusiastic “borrowing” of our popular Alex Salmond Dictator-Comparison Bingo piece, which they at least had the courtesy to acknowledge in print, albeit belatedly and after quite a lot of people shouting at them on Twitter. (It was such a good idea the Caledonian Mercury did its own tribute too.)

We’ve also been gratified to see other people finally picking up on the core and crucial observation about the nature of the independence referendum that we’ve been pushing since November 2011. (We won’t claim the credit for it being at the heart of the Yes Scotland campaign itself – we’re sure they knew it all along.)

Today, though, the thing we’re finding oddly familiar is a piece in Scotland on Sunday called “Will the SPL survive without Rangers?” The title and theme will ring an obvious bell with the over 20,000 viewers who’ve read our all-time most popular post, but the specifics are the really intriguing part, focusing as they do on the fact that several teams in particular wouldn’t be as badly damaged by the possible demise of Rangers as most of the media commentariat insists.

If we mention that the teams in question are Dundee United, Dundee, Hearts and Hibs, you’ll perhaps catch our drift. It’s nice to get paid for your analytical insight and research (and tracking down Dundee’s attendances from over half a decade ago was a tougher task than you might think) rather than just having other people take advantage of it, but setting the mainstream media’s agenda is at least some modest consolation.

We don’t plan to do this every month (and we’ve only done it once before), but we hope you’ll forgive us for celebrating a small Wings Over Scotland milestone. In April our readership figures smashed all previous records, and smashed them hard. Page views broke through the 100,000 barrier and kept on going, and by the end of the month were considerably higher than March and February put together.

We’re extra-pleased because there was no one huge story responsible for distorting the numbers (unlike in February, when the “Why Scotland Doesn’t Need Rangers” piece got over 15,000 by itself, many from people who don’t normally read the blog). April’s stats grew steadily and organically – the most popular single article contributing just 4% of the total compared to February’s 30% – and they show no signs of slowing.

Thanks to everyone who’s read the site, linked to it, plugged the stories on various social-media sites and everything else that contributes to this modest but gratifying success. Hopefully we’ll keep doing what more and more of you seem to like, and the voice of intelligent nationalism will get louder still.

We’ve been feeling a little hurt this week, readers. Judging by the number of bloggers and suchlike who’ve huffily blocked us on Twitter for no apparent reason, or just said nasty and untruthful things about us, we were beginning to think we must be bad people. So we were relieved beyond measure when we asked website-of-the-moment Klouchebag (which marks users on four undesirable traits, with low scores out of a maximum 100 being good) to analyse our tweet history and got this reassuring result:

Just for a bit of lightweight Friday-night fun, then, we decided to run a random selection of our follow list through the machine too, along with a small scattering of wildcards and some of the delicate wee flowers we’re clearly still too awful for, and see what an impartial automated observer made of it all.

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Wings Over Scotland is surprised, touched and delighted to have come out on top of the Scot Goes Pop! poll for "Favourite Political Blog" which was conducted over the past week. Having only been running for five months, we're thrilled and proud to have beaten over 50 other blogs to the title, and to be sharing the podium with a pair of quality sites like Lallands Peat Worrier and Bella Caledonia makes the pleasure all the sweeter. Thanks very much to everyone who voted for us, even if it was only as a result of our shameless Twitter plea for support on Saturday morning as we headed neck-and-neck with LPW towards the finishing post.

(In our defence, both they and BC did have a full day's extra voting over us due to the two-part nature of the poll, so we were just levelling the playing field…)

The best thing to come out of the survey, though, was the discovery of a blog we can't believe we weren't aware of before now, and which we're very excited to add to our "Zany Comedy Relief" link section. Councillor Terry Kelly proudly represents the good people of Paisley North West in the name of the Labour Party (having come top of the poll against eight opponents in 2007), and is standing for re-election to the council next month. We wish him the very best of luck in that quest – the independence movement desperately needs men of his calibre in the opposition.

We'll let you enjoy Terry's work for yourself, but in the interests of bloggerly comradeship we will offer him one bit of friendly advice. In a recent post entitled "CAN THE SNP SINK ANY LOWER?", the councillor furiously lambasts now-expelled ex-SNP candidate Lyall Duff over some well-publicised comments. But in doing so, he inexplicably conflates Mr Duff's words with those of a completely different nationalist activist by the name of Tommy Ball, who was recently and rightly condemned for tweeting some inflammatory and offensive attacks on British soldiers.

We're sure Councillor Kelly regrets this unfortunate and plainly defamatory slur against Mr Duff, who had no connection whatsoever to Mr Ball, and is embarrassed by his dreadful error in clumsily fusing the two men into one monstrous cybernat beast. We're equally certain that the countless Labour politicians, activists and journalists who've repeatedly demanded that the SNP leadership takes action against online abuse perpetrated by anonymous rogue nationalists will be swift in their public censure of Mr Kelly and have the offending material promptly removed.

In the anticipation of his fulsome retraction and apology, then, we feel safe and secure in recommending his splendid blog to you without hesitation.

Nobody starts a blog because they want to. It’s time-consuming, it costs money, and it opens you up to all manner of hideous abuse. In my 20-year career as a professional journalist I’ve had my home address and home phone number published countless times, usually accompanied by implied or explicit exhortations for people to come round and kick my head in. I’ve been the subject of more than one hate campaign so prolonged, vitriolic and alarming that serious police intervention was required. I lost count of the death threats (some of them made to my face) years ago. And the sheer volume of venomous, hysterical name-calling and general rage that’s been directed my way would fill every page of the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica and more.

(I should note, in the interests of fairness, that if it comes to a flame war I’m no fainting violet myself, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. In the circumstances, sometimes you’ve just got to let off a little steam or you’d go completely mad. I have very little time for sites that get all prissy about a good honest ding-dong.)

This blog carries no advertising. I’m freelance, and every hour I spend researching, checking, writing and maintaining it is an hour when I’m not earning money to pay for the (extortionate) rent, the (crippling) utility bills and the (debilitating) weakness for imported salt’n’vinegar flavour KP Mini Chips. Like the vast majority of others, I mostly blog – to coin a phrase – not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but out of frustration at an unheard, unrepresented voice.

Wings Over Scotland arose for just that reason. I’d been searching for a while for a Scottish political blog that wasn’t abysmally written, appallingly designed, intellectually embarrassing or all three, and in 2011 I briefly thought I’d discovered it in an earlier version of Better Nation. That illusion lasted for the few hours it took to be summarily banned, without warning or explanation (and by person or persons still unidentified), from commenting on my own article. It was at this point I reluctantly acknowledged that I couldn’t count on being able to express my uncensored views on Scottish politics anywhere unless I took matters into my own hands.

The blog’s been running for five months now, and has seen a pleasingly rapid growth in readership – monthly page views are now in six figures, and monthly unique users well into five figures. (We note, curiously, that almost no other blogs reveal their traffic levels even to that degree.) In that time we’ve also become much more intimately acquainted with the rest of the Scottish online media, both professional and blogosphere, and a few interesting things have become apparent. And since today’s a bit of a slow news day, it seems as good a time as any to examine some of them.

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Wings over Scotland is extremely chuffed to be able to welcome aboard a new contributor today, in the form of Scott Minto. Scott may already be familiar to those of you who regularly inhabit the Guardian's comment pages, where his alter-ego "sneekyboy" regularly posts lengthy streams of exceptionally well-informed and accurately-sourced data in response to Unionist misinformation and anti-Scottish trolling from Daily Mail and Express readers.

(We were especially impressed by his submissions to the Guardian's interesting recent "Reality Check" series on Scottish independence, where his command of officially-verified facts put not only other commenters to shame, but frequently also the authors of the articles themselves, by their own admission.)

He'll be lending us his encyclopaedic statistical knowledge but also gracing the blog with other contributions, columns and essays, of which you'll be seeing the first later today. It's a meaty, chunky piece to get your teeth into for the weekend, so go and pour yourself a wee dram in readiness and prepare to be enlightened. We're delighted to have Scott join the team, and we think you will be too.

If you'd like to contribute to Wings over Scotland too, we welcome all quality submissions, including from those opposed to independence. Drop us a line via our contact form or message us on Twitter.

We hope you’ll forgive this very brief self-indulgence, but we’re pretty chuffed about it and we just wanted to puff out our feathers for a moment.

February saw Wings over Scotland continue a trend which has seen our viewing figures double every month since we launched last November. Last month we had over 20,000 unique visitors, and page views soared well past 50,000 for the first time, with a series of records also broken for readership of individual stories.

We’re thrilled that a blog which backs up its assertions with sources and facts has already made a modest impact in a very crowded blogosphere, and hope our audience continues to grow. Thanks to everyone who’s visited and to all the people who’ve recommended us to others. We now return you to your normal programmes.

Just a quick bit of housekeeping here, folks, nothing much to see. I'm not used to being popular, so I'm a tad mystified by the flow of Game Center friend requests that arrive on my iThings every day from people I don't know, and who, to be honest, I have very little interest in being pretend internet buddies with. I'm 44, y'know? I very much enjoy challenging personal friends, professional acquaintances or WoSland readers at games, but not some random adolescent from Bumhole, Nebraska.

The big problem with the internet, though, is that even many otherwise sane and decent people still insist on using absurd playground nicknames to identify themselves rather than proper human names, or at least – as in my own case with Game Center – the recognisable name of their app/business/whatever. So a request from "sUP3rKEWLd00d__87" might, horrendously, turn out to be from a person I actually do know in some way and would (inexplicably) wish to be "friends" with.

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Alert readers may recall a few weeks back I gave an interview to a blog written by a bunch of – well, let's call them "games journalists" for want of a more accurate term. A straightforward enough business, you might think – ask questions, get replies, publish, done. It didn't work out quite that simply.

While the interview caused a huge hit spike on the site and an unprecedented number of comments (over 100 compared to their usual three or four), this sudden influx of visitors and attention caused great consternation among some of the blog's editors other than the charming and talented young writer who'd done the interview.

Two of them – a pair of particularly lily-livered Future Publishing corporate drones – whined all over Twitter and elsewhere that the (incredibly mild) arguments in the comments were so beastly and upsetting that they were considering deleting the entire site, rather than attract all these awful, horrid people (ie, readers) to it by speaking to such a nasty man.

Long story short, to spare the hurt feelings of the less-popular stories on their blog (which is to say, all of them) the interview has been quietly deleted. So I've retrieved it and posted it below for posterity.

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If people really can’t behave in other comment threads and insist on derailing them with irrelevant and disruptive posts, as a last resort the comments in question will be moved here. People are also free to use it for general off-topic chat.