Oggy Bloggy Ogwr : Celebrating Five Years

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant Hapus. It's also tenth anniversary of the official opening of the Senedd building and - much more importantly (obviously) - it marks five years since I started Oggy Bloggy Ogwr.

In my own style, I turn my attentions towards myself to see if I'm doing everything I set out to do (and provide a rare opportunity for some back-slapping). Most of the following was from mid-February and the statistics have been taken from Google Analytics and the analytics tools of individual social media sites.

Top Twenty Most Read Posts Ever

1. Wales : An Economic Profile (combined 3.9.12 – 13.9.12) – More than 25,000 views to date and still read to this day.
2. Independence Minutiae : Postal Services (20.5.12) – Most views for a single post. I'm not joking; you lot are weird....but it's probably down to a spambot.
3. Life, Ethics & Independence (combined 17.11.12 – 4.10.14)
4. Wales doesn't need a Borgen, it needs a Spitting Image (9.7.12) - ....in the end we got a "Borgen" (Byw Celwydd).
5. Defending Wales (combined 19.3.12 – 25.3.12)
6. 14-19 Qualifications Review (11.12.12)
7. A Welsh Honours System (13.12.12)
8. Wales on Drugs (combined 18.3.14 – 29.3.14)
9. Vibrant & Viable Places – a new regeneration strategy (10.4.13)
10. Election 2016 : Six Months to Go (5.11.15)
11. Council Tax : Are the poor paying more? (3.4.12)
12. Ogmore Vale By-Election Result (13.12.15)
13. No stay of execution for the Berwyn Centre (11.10.12)
14. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap? (18.9.12) – Holds the record for most comments on a single post as far as I can tell.
15. What Wales gets from the European Union (8.12.12)
16. Local Sovereignty (combined 19.3.13 – 30.3.13)
17. Twinning the Nation - What nations are like Wales? (27.5.13)
18. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap – Round III (17.7.13)
19. Wales & The World (combined 3.8.15 – 28.8.15)
20. Rhiw Redevelopment Plans Unveiled (05.02.15)

My Favourites

• Duke spurts royal jelly into future Queen – My favourite title. I'm still proud of that one.
• Forced Cymraeg : A Special Investigation - As relevant now as ever.
• Assembly Integrated Transport Inquiry (It's good, seriously!) – One of the few "serious" posts where the underpinning report was a genuine pleasure to read.
• The Higgitt Question - Differences Between Wales & England (I, II, III) – Narrowly misses out on my top 20 and still quite popular. It marks the point where I started to be taken more seriously as a blogger. Although I was inspired to start this through the likes of Syniadau, Welsh Ramblings, Ordovicius etc, you can argue a few tweets from Adam & Duncan Higgitt of (the defunct) Wales Home acted as the catalyst. I won't forget that.
• Proctalgia Fugax AM 1964-2014 – Combines some of my favourite past times : black comedy, booty and taking the piss out of the Lib Dems.
• The Aristocrats of Question Time – I don't like Question Time.
• Translation for the Nation – I don't like buzzwords and unnecessarily complicated political-bubble speak either.
• Apocalypse Nawr – These parody/satirical posts might not always be funny, but they're often fun to write.
• Up Shipton Creek – Mainly for the title pun, but also as it underlined how editorial standards at Media Wales have slipped. Although they haven't really tried it again since, this is what UKIP can look forward to.
• Kings of their castles – My first foray into the People's Republic of Carmarthenshire.

I'm always concerned that the next post will be "the one" that destroys my reputation.
This sums up the feeling I get just before hitting "publish" for every single blog. And yet I kept doing it.

As I've said before this is an unpaid, largely thankless, "job" - one I've been doing practically non-stop for five-f**king-years, with the Assembly election, Police & Crime Commissioner elections, EU Referendum and a local Westminster parliamentary by-election looming on the horizon. As those of you who went to the recent Yes Cymru launch in Cardiff might remember I'm working on a draft Welsh version of Wings over Scotland's "Wee Blue Book" too. No pressure. No money and little respect either.

I must be mad or stupid, probably both, and I'm losing my hair as fast as my sanity. Come the end of June there's no doubt I'm going to be mentally exhausted at the very least.

Nobody can accuse me of being unmotivated or lacking patience and staying power; though I can give up on a proper social life, relationships and all that stuff now - that's long gone. Writing up a single one hour Assembly debate takes up to 3 hours work (including watching them), a long committee report might take 4 hours (including reading them) – though I've become quicker at it. The "series" and independence posts take months and are more carefully planned that you might expect.

"Thank you, Owen."

As I said at the end of last year, there's a sense this blog is coming to a natural end. I wouldn't say the work here is taken for granted because I'm not important enough to be taken for granted in the first place, but I don't know whether I've outstayed my welcome or not really needed or wanted anymore. The way information is disseminated is changing rapidly, and I won't be able to keep up with quick fire social media stuff as I'll just get lost in the noise. You're not reading any of this, are you?

Whether I quit or not is partly down to whether I get sectioned, partly because doing this has become a habit, partly down to whether I'm stupid enough to keep it going.

I don't get sentimental often, but what's kept it going through the good times and the very, very bad times is you. If I didn't know I had such a loyal audience, who presumably value what's done here, I would've called it a day a long time ago.

As you can see from the info above it's too much work for little to no reward, and as you can imagine it really, really gets my goat when AMs, and other members of the great and the good, say "nobody covers Welsh politics/the Assembly in any detail."  877,000 words - and I think that's an under-estimate.
The audience might not be as big as I would like, and although it's obvious the blog is read, it's clear people are embarrassed to admit to reading or liking it. I'm used to being treated like that so I understand and won't take it personally; someone has to do the heavy lifting (aka. incredibly boring stuff) and I took the idiotic decision to volunteer all those years ago.

As a result I might not get the retweets, likes, pats on the head or whatever that do justice to the effort that sometimes goes into this, but I reserve a special shout out and thanks to Ant Evans (@antevans) who's done more than most to spread the word on Twitter in particular.

It's much easier to seek out scandal, gossip or sensationalism anyway. I could've sold my soul and set up as another attack blog to deliberately cause embarrassment or push people's buttons; that's not my style, and although it'll cost me publicity it never will be my style either. I'm more interested in the actual truth instead of inventing a truth.

Even if, down the years, I've pissed off and pleased many people at the same time, it's clear the audience is very mature and deserve better than low-brow muckraking. I've had to delete one non-spam comment in five years (because it was potentially libellous). One.

I've never had a serious problem with hate mail or trolling. When people have disagreed with what I've written they've been fair and reasonable about it. Considering politics is often a very polarising issue for most folk that's unbelievable, and I consider it a mark of mutual respect in addition to being one of the unexpected highlights of doing this.

So whether you've accidentally stumbled on it, are some of the hardcore who've been there since the start, read it for the first time today or read it a thousand times....thank you.