I’m proud to be Bloglines subscriber #1 to Westmonster, the new political blog out of Lloyd Shepherd’s Messy Media stable. Initial reactions are favourable: relevant content, tightly edited, and with that increasingly familiar ‘chatty’ style. But they’ve gone heavy on the site’s design, lots of Flash and javascript… and whilst it looks great, it’s infuriatingly sluggish to scroll on my (not quite top-spec but perfectly respectable) desktop PC.
With the Sky News political blog adopting a similar approach, this is getting to be quite a busy niche… Incidentally, have you seen the new banner image atop adamboulton.typepad.com? All a bit ‘crouch, touch, hold, engage!’ for me…
Response
Unfortunately the comparison doesn’t help Westmonster. The new bitchier Boulton blog is much funnier and with more real gossip. Westmonster isn’t different enough and the content is too gentle and over-written – but give it time…