New Years Blogging Resolutions

1) Hammer your niche – This blog has a bit of a niche that isn’t really filled by any other blog (although there are some that come close). That doesn’t mean only post on these issues as there are people who read the posts about other issues too. Try to keep a good balance between crime posts and other ones roughly 1:1.

2) Try to develop the blog – make the commenting policy more of a welcoming statements, try and develop the links to resources section of the site, try to work on the look of the site to make it more appealing (perhaps even consider moving to Wordpress), and also try to include some pictures with posts.

3) Write a more finalised text based on the Draft Principles of a Marxist Approach to Criminology. Latest draft can be found http://leftwingcriminologist.blogspot.com/2008/12/principles-of-marxist-approach-to.html

4) Reduce the number of articles re-posted from other sites. Whilst these are no doubt often very good articles, surely your readers would appreciate your own commentary and take on the events as well from which you could link to the original article.

5) Try to get some guest posts on the website – these could include articles written by local members of Socialist Students and the Socialist Party. Another source could be encouraging other Socialist Party members to write some articles for blog on crime related issues.

6) Do more ‘cultural’ stuff, ie. more posts on music, TV and films. Okay, you don’t do anywhere near as refined analysis of many things like on A Very Public Sociologist or other blogs but people still read them. Rather you tend to hammer on about one point of them.

7) Do more stuff on previous ‘Marxist’ criminology. Do more posts on the National Deviancy Conference, for example.

8) On a similar note, do some critique’s of more ‘traditional’ criminological theory and ideas.

9) Remember, you are part of a blogging community – you should try to link to more people. On a similar note, weren’t you supposed to do a Carnival of Socialism? You should also comment on crime related posts on other website to encourage discussion of these issues.

10) Try to avoid long gaps between blogging – try not to leave it more than two days if possible. Also, try to see if there is a way of automating posts that you have already written to appear if you know you won’t be able to blog for a while (which would have been useful recently).

By the way, some blogs I've recently linked to are Journeyman, A Socialist Malaysia, Jour de Fete, Seren's Blog, and possibly some others. Check them out.