Reviewing the aggregators

Getting your message to the people is easy. Getting the people to notice your message - that's a different story. It takes minutes to start your own blog. But it takes months to build up an audience, a group of people that would visit your blog regularly, curious what else you got for them today. There are various options for a new blogger. Joining a blog roll or an aggregator is one of them. I started blogging about 3 moths ago. Here's what I can say about the aggregators of which I am a member.

SoCon Blogs
A simple aggregator for the supporters of the Family Coalition Party of Ontario, as well as Social Conservative bloggers from the rest of Canada. That was the first aggregator I joined. A great place to start for a new blogger with Social Conservative views. Posts usually stay visible for some 8 to 12 hours, if not longer. Too bad however there are no archives, so you can't check back on a post you've seen a few days ago but forgot to bookmark.

Opinions Canada
A multi-partisan aggregator for as many as 206 blogs. Most of the blogs are regularly updated and the space is limited, so individual posts don't stay visible longer than a few hours. Yet even that is enough to get noticed, especially if it doesn't take hours for your post to ignite a stormy discussion. The only drawback - the updates are often delayed, so if your post is published after 10PM Atlantic time, it most likely won't be there until early next morning.

Peter's Politics
Excellent aggregator. New posts are shown immediately and stay on the front page for about 6-8 hours, with links to the archives also available. Moreover, if you take a look at the poster's profile, you'll get a list of all his recent posts. So even if your post is no longer on the front page - it doesn't mean it's gone. The aggregator is multi-partisan, so be prepared to run into an article with which you don't agree. But posters speaking on behalf of a political party could have their posts identified by a logo of the party they represent.

Blogging Canadians
This promises to develop into a full-scale portal dedicated to political discussion, which is going to include not just the blog aggregator but also discussion forums, article ratings and probably some other features too. The blogs are identified by the party affiliation so you can choose which blogs you're in the mood to read. Also you can vote for the posts you like - that's yet another nice feature. So far it's still under development; updates only take place once or twice a day and some of the posts may be left out; not sure if it's because the site administration considers them controversial or if they simply get unnoticed by the person who does the updates.

And finally - Free Dominion
Not just a huge discussion forum for Conservatives (any Conservatives, not only SoCons) but also a blog aggregator. Not every article makes it to the front page but the best of them do.