Thanks for being so gracious and responding to my point so promptly – I think the rest of it pretty much hit the nail on the head. Yes – I love the comments box on the blogs I do too, and, these days, I get cross with websites that don’t have this facility!

Thank you so much for clarifying this, and i hope the rest of it is not that bad. Cheers.

“The bottom line is, your neighborhood news matter, whether it’s a poorly made manhole, or a broken streetlight, or crime. It’s these bits of information that become important when you are living – or wanting to live – in a neighborhood.”

Of course one of the functions of local blogs can be to highlight these things. However, I don’t think our blog has ever mentioned a broken streetlight, poorly made manhole or a crime. If we did do so it would be within a much broader context. (We have listed deficiencies within the centre as ‘bits of information’ but such ‘bits’ are presented as part of a whole. We are not terribly interested in someone coming out and fixing one or two of these things in isolation.) We are campaigning for major changes to our neighbourhood – some of these, like our campaigns for Shared Space, a Conservation Area, or to protect green spaces and trees, for example, are because we subscribe to particular, broader, philosophies and hope, especially with the Shared Space Campaign, to have a wider, even national impact, too.

There’s nothing wrong with campaigning about a poorly fixed manhole cover by presenting a ‘bit of information’ about it, but I would have liked to see slightly more emphasis on the bigger picture that local blogs can also be working on.

Also our blog (like most of the blogs in my area) is a campaign tool which represents a group of concerned individuals who do other things, as well as merely blog.