Life is often full of surprises.  Our sleepy little farm outside of Downsville is becoming a hotbed of political activity even though I wasn't expecting it. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that it was a shame that lots of bloggers are covering the Democratic Convention in August, but that there isn't any centralized place to read all of that work. 

Then, more recently, Borges (from Kicktime )and I were at the Journalism That Matters and National Conference for Media Reform shindigs in Minneapolis, and we got to talking about how it's too bad that there's no central place to read all of the blogs in Wisconsin.  We talked to some other people about that as well, and a few actions are falling out from that.

So - we're in the process of launching a new web site - RootsWire . It's barely up and hobbling in Beta status, but the basic idea is that it will serve to merge together various blogs that have chosen to participate, and will become a news and opinion magazine.  Our first project is to aggregate together any of the Democratic Convention bloggers who want to participate in the project.  So far we have 18 blogs signed up, with more coming in all the time.  This is an exciting project, and we hope it will benefit everyone involved.

Next we are also working on pulling together progressive political blogs and place blogs from different parts of Wisconsin into a state-wide news and opinion magazine. Assuming that all goes well, we'd like to expand to other parts of the country as well.  

Let us know what you think.  The site needs to have some theming and organizational love at this time, which we're working on. We'd love to have more ideas for the site and would like to know if you're interested in the project, and in contributing to it.