Welcome to the Port Writers Alliance

I’m pleased to announce today the formation of the Port Writers Alliance.  This is a collective effort of Antemedius, DocuDharma, Firefly Dreaming, Ignoring Asia, The Dream Antilles, The Stars Hollow Gazette, Wild Wild Left, and writing in the rAw.

About The Name

A little to the left of starboard if you get the drift.  A harbor or anchorage.

About The Concept

There’s a lot of news and commentary that could be receiving more attention.

Rather than crosspost on a single central site what we’d like to encourage is crossreading and commenting.

We’ll be using two mechanisms to accomplish this-

• Firedog Lake style links to affiliated sites across the banner (props).  I’ve always admired the way Jane and her crew have been able to maximize excitement and can only hope to emulate it.

• Regular cross promotional digests of associated sites’ content.

How Does This Work?

Each site will decide for itself the content they want to feature and how often.  They’ll produce a digest and publish it on the affiliated sites.  It will be promoted by the host or not whenever, depending on the desires of the host site.

Authors must choose for themselves if they want to crosspost, though they should expect requests to do so.

The point is to increase visibility and impact.

Independence

Each site has it’s own vibe.  Formula One and Le Tour and if you ever think I’m talking about Politics you are sadly mistaken.

Content that is acceptable in some places is not in others and it is up to the host to decide.  All you free speech advocates can find a place to express yourselves I’m sure.  Port Writers Alliance sites enforce their own polices which are not uniform.

Success

The objective is that we’ll drive some traffic and raise some awareness.  I like to keep expectations realistic.

What you will see as a reader

Below each site’s Banner you’ll see some buttons that take you to the Front Page of each site.  Fairly frequently you’ll see a digest post from the individual sites that provide links to content they wish to highlight.  Sometimes it will have been crossposted but often not, so the pieces may be of special interest to you and you’ll want to click through and read them.  Even for crossposted pieces the reactions will be different.

If you wish to comment or contribute you’ll have to register independently at that site.  We just don’t have the technology Jane does at Firedog Lake.

If you are used to the pace of Daily Kos (and I don’t link just because I’m not sure about stability with the advent of dK 4.0) what you will find is that our blogs run quite a bit slower.  You can’t expect instant reactions or high volume responses.

On the other hand we’re attempting with this project to expose you to a wide range of diverse content so that there is plenty for you to read and explore.

I’m interested in your reactions to this initiative.  Please let me know below.