Thomas Tales

There is an argument occasionally proffered by historians, journalists and statesmen that Wales only became a nation when the BBC decided to call it one.

When transmitters were erected across Britain at the dawn of the TV revolution, the island was divided into English regions and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish nations. The move, it's argued, promoted patriotism within these culturally distinctive nations and paved the way for the devolved governments which now operate within their capitals.

But while the Celts revelled in achieving a recognised identity, England's regions enjoyed a more localised service which directly reflected its smaller audience's tastes and interests. In Wales though, only the national picture prevailed. This meant that whether one watched BBC or the brand-new ITV, the offering was consistently diverse enough to be relevant to everyone and no-one.

To this day, the distinctly different demands of Welsh communities are not consistently addressed by any of our national broadcasters. BBC Wales does its best - occasional west Wales opt-outs on BBC Radio Cymru, and live match commentary for either Cardiff City, Swansea City or Wrexham depending on your locality. But if audiences want community news they must opt for an unreliable local radio bulletin or the decidedly shaky online offerings of their local papers.

This is why the BBC Trust's decision to call a halt to the corporation's ambitious local websites plan is such a blow for Wales. The sites would have given a reliable, trustworthy source of local news and information that is currently unavailable. They would also offer a portal for people to access services within their area that would otherwise have gone undiscovered, and encouraged people to engage with their community via the BBC's reputation for honesty and good journalism.

Crucially, the sites would have been available in Welsh as well as English. This vital element would have given life into the communities that are struggling to keep their native Welsh speakers from leaving for bigger towns or English cities. Community news in Welsh has traditionally fallen on the now ailing network of Welsh language community newspapers like Y Dinesydd in Cardiff, and Yr Hogwr in Bridgend. They are staffed by an aging group of dedicated volunteers, but the readership among younger generations is almost negligible.

These community papers would benefit from taking the BBC's axed plans on board and developing their own websites, and hopefully the cash won by Golwg (the Welsh language weekly magazine) to launch an online Welsh news service will be enough to nourish local Welsh language news rather than another version of BBC Newyddion Ar-Lein.

Wales's communities would have benefited immeasurably from the BBC's local video websites. Hopefully the commercial sector will now react and produce more reliable, interesting local content without the threat of bigger and better offerings from the Beeb.

Over at my arts blog, search engine optimisation unexpectedly made an appearance this week.

I had written a piece about the palaver surrounding Patrick Jones' poetry reading, but its headline seemingly lent itself to Google's search machine priorities and within hours it was amongst the top five results for people searching combinations of "Welsh", "poet" and "Christian Voice".

Of course, there's far more to achieving a first-page result on Google than the make-up of your headline. Ensuring your journalism is part of a network means people will read you, link to you, and come back to you. Only by interacting with other journalists in your network can you achieve consistently high Google rankings, and generate a steady stream of traffic.

But why should readers come back at all? Far from saturating your blog with keywords and spamming the comment threads of others by depositing a link along with a banal sentence, networked journalism requires you to earn your readers' respect.

The best bloggers provide regular, articulate comment that encourages a loyal readership regardless of whether everything they say is necessarily accurate or informative. In politics, Iain Dale states he's had over half a million unique visitors to his blog in the last year, and lists the top sites which generate the most traffic. He is easily trumping half the magazines on the news-stand with results like that.

And readership numbers on the internet are far easier to calculate than in the conventional press. The ABCs don't take into account the fact that a reader doesn't consume every article on every page. But a service like Google Analytics gives an absolute breakdown, so a blog-owner can immediately assess which articles work and which ones don't.

This is great for small-scale bloggers, but priceless information for corporations tip-toeing carefully into the blogosphere. When cash is your main motivation, getting accurate data about who is consuming your product means you can deliver what they want and keep them coming back for more. This is particularly relevant in niche markets, and allows blogs to develop quickly into reliable sources of informed comment on a particular subject.

The sad truth is that without a wider network, a few choice keywords in your headline don't do enough to draw in new readers or keep old ones coming back. The proof? My post on the Welsh poet has now vanished into the Google ether, without a network to support its veracity or reliability.