Explaining Northern Ireland to an outsider is a bit like trying to explain something complex to a drunk man. You have to be patient, be prepared to do it slowly, bit by bit and over a long time. It's no coincidence that my own website on Northern Irish politics and culture began life with the title Letter to Slugger O'Toole ('who was drunk as a rule') - from the old song The Irish Rover.
What pushed me into having my own site was my struggle to find a particular story on the annual Orange parade in Rossnowlagh, Donegal, which I
remembered had been published in the Irish Times some time in 1999. After half an hour of endlessly wading through the paper's online archive system,
I gave up in frustration.
Instead I set up my own weblog (or blog) website. It allowed me to 'link' to news, stories and comment on the Internet in a way that meant I could find
them again when I wanted them. It drew me into a wider 'blogging' phenomenon that has seen ordinary citizens from Iran to China and the US
find their own particular voices.
Within three weeks, the site was attracting 80 visitors a day. Two and a half years later, it now draws up to 3,300 political junkies of all political shades from across the world on a daily basis.
One of the key characteristics of Slugger has been the reader's ability to respond. This took off in March 2003, when we started to publish interviews, and reports of a research project looking into the future of unionism. By June of this year, our stories were receiving over 1,000 of these comments a week.
The main challenge has been making it easy to join in, whilst maintaining high standards of debate. Very quickly, "playing the ball, not the man" became a watchword. We instigated an informal system of notional yellow and red cards. The first person to be red carded (i.e. excluded for a fortnight) for persistent offending was a strongly pro-Agreement, MLA.
However outside ad hominem attacks, directness is encouraged. All of northern political life is there: from dissident republicans to hardline DUP supporters. The DUP and Sinn Féin might not engage in direct talks, but on Slugger their members routinely hammer out issues and share gossip from lost pumas in North Antrim, to the latest political defection, to the parties' odds with Paddy Power for the elections.
Former Stormont Ministers Nigel Dodds of the DUP and Sean Farren of the SDLP, for example, spent several weeks on Slugger sounding out each other on
the scope for acceptable change to the original Belfast Agreement.
Each story attracts a majority of either unionist or nationalist commentators, depending on which particular tribe the original is aimed at. However, I once wrote a deliberately rough and ready review of the parties' election websites. Soon after a Sinn Féin activist, who argued that "voters aren't influenced by the web", launched a lengthy discussion with a DUP supporter, not about politics, but the business of doing politics.
This kind of discussion, which bridges party loyalties, in the interests of learning how to do politics better, may be commonplace elsewhere. In Northern Ireland, it's rare. From Slugger's accidental beginnings, it has moved towards certain (oft abused) journalistic values, such as accuracy, transparency, balance and a nose for a good story.
If it is journalism, then it is one developed under different conditions to that of the mainstream. The intimacy with the audience means that you rarely get the last word on anything. Slugger's journalism has a rough, provisional character that allows stories to grow steadily, become more complex, and on occasion express paradox.
In the US, an increasing number of big media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post, and Microsoft's online journal, Slate have brought bloggers in-house to make notes on and probe the complexities of the modern world. With a few exceptions, the mainstream in Ireland and Britain
has yet to harness this business of blogging.
Sites like SluggerOToole.com have so far been seen as alternative forms of journalism. With their greater interactivity and faster and more flexible format, it may not be so long before the mainstream is playing catch-up.
