Welcome to part six of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Alex Foster.

When writing for a blog, perhaps the default view I have of my reader is someone who is familiar with my entire body of work, someone who started at the first thing I wrote, and read it through in order. That person would have a pretty good understanding of what I meant whenever I made a reference to something I have previously written.

Life’s not like that, however. Most of my readers have no clue what I was thinking this time last year. Most of your readers too will come to your blog posts from a variety of sources, and may not regularly read your work. If you’re on Lib Dem Blogs, a particularly eye-catching title may draw in readers that haven’t seen your output before. And the more you write, the longer you are around, and the better you work with search engines, the more people will find your blog from bizarre search terms that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you are actually writing about. (Fully three quarters of my traffic is from search engine referrals, and of those, the majority have landed on me from a search about “number one when I was born” which links to a post I wrote three years ago. Either that or pear crumble.)

So given that most of your readers come to your site without much of a clue what you write about, it’s really important to give them a clue often. You can’t ever say things, “as I said yesterday” because your casual visitors won’t know what you said yesterday. Even if yesterday’s post was the last thing you wrote, if your visitor has followed a link to the blog post in full and not to your blog as a whole, they won’t easily be able to find the post.

What you need to do is to refer them to what they’re looking for using a hyperlink. What I wrote the month before last, with a handy link to what it is you referred to, means that anyone who’s landed on your blog and is interested in your topic can follow your train of thought.

Referring back to your old stock of writing is also excellent for keeping your best pieces fresh in people’s minds; and the more links you use, the better search engines will be able to see how your thoughts are structured. That context is all the more important if what you are referring to was written on someone else’s blog or a newspaper article.

Finally, if you notice from your logs, or a third party tool like Google Analytics or MyBlogLog, that people are frequently landing on the same posts from years back, it’s worth going back and editing them a little to help direct your new readers at your new material. I’ve made sure I have Google ads on the pages that are most often read, and have sometimes gone back to add in bulletted lists at the end of pieces to signpost people at other posts.

Here’s a handful of videos doing the rounds from American politics.

First up “There’s a rep for that!” – riffing on the iPhone’s ad showing how there’s an application to do the most ridiculous things, here’s a video with a light-hearted but deadly serious look at some of the disgraceful campaigns American Republicans have run:

Second, a similarly light-hearted but deadly serious song about gay marriage in the States, following voters striking down judicial efforts to get marriage for homos on the statute books: Stupid Callous Homophobic Hateful Legislation. Can you guess the tune before you hit play?

Thirdly, via Liberal Conspiracy, here is the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart highlighting some dodgy Fox camera work:

Good morning. Today in 1990, Tim Berners Lee published a formal proposal for the world wide web. Today nearly twenty years later, here we all are. And isn’t it frightening that 1990 is nearly twenty years ago?!

2 Big Stories

Labour’s plan for ‘John Lewis’ public services

The Guardian is reporting that the Labour party are proposing mutualising public bodies – and the Guardian thinks the concept of mutualisation will be so alien to its readers that the only way of explaining it is by analogy to John Lewis.

Hospitals and schools would be transformed into John Lewis-style partnerships under radical plans that could form a central plank of Labour’s general election manifesto.

Public sector bodies, which would also include leisure centres, housing organisations and social care providers, would be allowed to take control of their own affairs if staff and users voted in favour.

Quite an amazing change of fortune from the party that has spent the last dozen years increasing Whitehall control over – well, pretty much everything.

Valerie Singleton launches six-button computer to get elderly online

The Telegraph has the story.

The screens of new PCs have just six buttons, allowing technology-shy users to surf the internet, send emails and watch videos without having to navigate around cluttered desktops.

My immediate facetious flippant thought is that receiving email from elderly people who have keyboards with only six buttons might well be a frustrating experience for all concerned. Which 20 letters will they omit?

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

• Scrutinising Scrutiny

John Ault has news of a Tory council about to disappear up its own fundament:

Conservative controlled Wealden District Council, has ‘set up a scrutiny panel to scrutinise its scrutiny panels.’

• Is this available in English?

Alex Folkes highlights an unreadable high level strategic document from new Cornwall Council. Not in Cornish, but in management jargon.

At Cabinet today, member queued up to complain about it and wrung an admission from the Leader that it needed to be ‘in plain English and fit for purpose’. Cabinet Member Carolyn Rule agreed to go away and proof-read it. I hope that she goes further and gets it re-written in English.

Don’t miss p23!

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.