Today marks exactly one year since this blog made its first appearance. In that time we’ve run 305 posts, covering elections and political happenings all around the world.
Thanks are due to Crikey for hosting The World is Not Enough and providing both technical and moral support. More importantly, thanks are due to all our readers and commenters for making the whole thing possible.
From my admittedly biased position, I think we’ve done some pretty good stuff in the course of the year. A few of my personal favorites would be:
- January’s reflection on the perils of insular thinking in Australia.
- Our Italian election coverage, including repeated digs at the BBC for its inability to understand the official results.
- Getting ahead of the media on understanding New Zealand’s approval of same-sex marriage.
- The post-mortem on the Malaysian election, exposing the nature of its unfairness.
- My analysis of the background and significance of the anti-government protests in Turkey.
- Explaining the relationship between Egypt’s coup and its electoral system.
- My commentary on a search for libertarians in the United States.
For the coming year, expect an equally broad coverage, learning (I hope) from experience and bringing you informed and thoughtful discussion about world politics. It should be a big year, with elections scheduled in India, South Africa, Indonesia, Sweden, Brazil, New Zealand and many other interesting places.
Blogging will be on a somewhat reduced schedule for the next three weeks, but there’ll still be plenty to talk about. In particular, don’t miss my review of the top elections for 2013, which will appear on New Year’s Eve. (You can read last year’s version here.)
We’re not asking for birthday presents*, but if you’re able to take just a minute or two of your time I’d love you to leave a comment below, letting us know your reactions to the blog so far: what you like or don’t like, what you think we could do better, what you’d like to see more (or less) of in 2014.
The more people join the discussion, the more we can all learn.
* Although if you want to spend some money, Crikey has a wonderful range of holiday gifts available.
The World is Not Enough 
I think the blog is great. I seldom disagree with it, but even when I do there is a worthy argument to engage with, and it’s great to see so many countries getting covered.
The only suggestion I would make in regard to content is that you seem to feel the need to stick to the same sort of length of a piece in Crikey or a newspaper Op Ed. Generally that is probably better than the tendency to bloat a lot of bloggers (myself included) suffer from. Nevertheless, now and then I think there is a topic that deserves a bit more length.
More significantly, I think it deserves to be much more widely read, and maybe some more thought could go into promotion. I don’t share it all that often because there is so much and it feels repetitious to promote the same blog too often, but I do wonder if a concerted blitz to promote some posts wouldn’t be worthwhile.
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This blog is a gem! There is always both a great general explanation on what is happening on any issue covered but also excellent in-depth analysis.
Keep up the awesome work!
(This blog is going to make year 12 politics next year a whole lot easier!)
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Thanks Charles, always interesting and one of the couple of reasons I subscribe, even if it is outside the wall.
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Thanks very much Stephen, Josh and Rob – your kind words are very much appreciated.
Stephen, thanks for the thoughts – I do tend to shy away from the longer posts probably more than I should, partly from not wanting to tire the reader’s patience & partly just thru force of habit. I do want to work on some slightly more theoretical or reflective stuff next year, so there might be a couple of longer posts there. As to promotion, that’s mainly a task for my lords and masters at Crikey, but I’ll certainly put the thought to them. And obviously, if you can all tell your friends that would be really great.
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‘THRU’???
No, you’ve gone too far.
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*sobs*
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