I started blogging on politics, economics and current affairs in mid-2010.
The piece that started me on the blogging trail, but which didn’t appear anywhere very high profile, was:
- Dave the Deficit Hawk (07/06/10)
I have blogged on a number of different platforms, but my posts are all brought together on my blog at alexsarchives.org. At the moment this is more of an archive than anything else.
The heyday of blogging was probably 2008 to 2015. I – along with many other high profile political bloggers – am much less active now.
Between 2011 and 2015 I put together six themed collections of my blog posts:
- Marginal Notes: Offline essays on economics and policy
- Travels through Coalitionland: Notes of disquiet and dissent
- The policy con is on: welfare and workfare in Cameron’s Britain
- The problem of housing supply
- Economics after the crash
- Making the case for housing
You can view and download them here.
I was a contributor at Dale & Co, the current affairs megablog, during 2011 and 2012. Dale & Co was voted 9th in the ranking of top political blogs at the 2011 Total Politics Blog awards.
Over time I also posted at a wide range of other sites. These included: Liberal Democrat Voice, Guardian Housing Network, LSE British Politics & Policy, LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, The Conversation UK, The Policy Press blog, Democratic Audit, PolicyBristol blog, and the CaCHE blog.
Between the summer of 2012 and the end of 2014 my blog was consistently among the top 100 UK politics blogs in the ebuzzing/teads monthly blog ranking. It spent the last of those years in the top 50. That seemed like an achievement at the time – it meant that people were reading and circulating what I was posting, and back then that felt like a novelty for an academic. At the end of 2014 someone killed the data source and the ranking abruptly stopped being compiled.
Image: © Steve Young (via Fotolia.com)