I could pee myself with glee. The new Politics Home Index website has launched, and it’s about 50,000,000,000 times better than one could have imagined. There are many downsides to it, but first allow me to explain why it is my new web homepage (at the cost of my own domain, which I pay good money for). My initial assessment may well be premature, but I like to think of myself as an impulsive kind of guy.

Instead of visiting 10 different news sites and blogs each time I log on to the web, I can now see all I need to know in one place. I used to get a gist of what was going on in the world by reading the BBC news website, then scanning several other sites for full reports and better analysis. Such action is now redundant: Politics Home links to five sources of the top stories, so it acts as a hub for all of my political browsing needs.

There is a live blogfeed across the top of the page, pointing you to the latest posts from 100 blogs. For fear of missing posts, I cannot imagine people using this to navigate blog sites, but the range of sources included will certainly draw traffic to blogs that might not see many visitors normally.

There is a tumbnail image of the front pages of the daily papers - my daily visit to the Sky News site is rendered unnecessary.

The “Green Box” does exactly what it says on the tin - linking to all of today’s top stories as they happen.

The Comment and Analysis section points you towards (you guessed it) comments and analysis pages. In reading a broadsheet, I read comment pieces; in browsing newspaper websites online, I do not. No longer do I need to navigate from the News > UK News > Politics section of a paper’s website to its comment section: quality articles are linked from the Politics Home page.

Everything is centred on one page. All links open in a new tab (or window, depending on your browser settings), and you can simply switch back to see more of the same. There is no sub-category system where different kinds of articles are linked on different pages: everything is listed together, so one is more inclined to read a wider range of types of coverage from a wider range of sources. That can only be a good thing.

My favourite part of the site is the Phi Numbers section, in the right hand column. This gives a breakdown of the latest opinions of 100 “Westminster insiders”, giving a genuine insight into political developments. It also provides a breakdown of which stories are gaining the most attention in the media - calculated by column inches in one graph and by an apparently arbitrary “news priority” index in another. This is a huge step forward in media-watching.

No review of the site would be complete without dissecting its failings, and there are several downsides to the website. Some faults are easily fixed, but others are simply a natural part of this kind of website.

The blog aggregator risks concentrating traffic on “high-ranking” weblogs, leaving the smaller and more independent-minded blogs shut out. By the nature of collaborative blogs funded by the mainstream media organisations, the aggregator is dominated by a few sources, such as the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip. As such, only a handful of individual, non-commercial, traditional blogs are featured. An “us and them” mentality already exists in the British Blogosphere, where individuals such as Iain Dale boast monthly of rising web statistics, whereas your average bloke with a Blogger account gets a few hundred hits each month, mainly from a very small group of readers. Quality control is difficult, and manual blog searches are time-consuming, but there is something quite perverse about aggregating 100 cherry-picked blogs for reading. Iain Dale’s “Daley Dozen” (tacky name aside) provides links to some blogs I have never even heard of, and I appreciate the effort he takes to list these quality posts.

Politics Home acts as a hub, linking out to all kinds of news and comment sources. There is a danger with such a site that it becomes a cold, faceless site with no character. I recoiled at the sight of the homepage when I first saw it, literally scared by the amount of information being thrust at me. It may well be the Bloomberg of the political world, but it inherits the same demerits. I like character to shine through what I read: there is a danger that Politics Home will distill the character of the sites it links to.

The Magazines section is a great source for more in-depth articles, but I can’t help but feel that it would benefit from a media section.

There may be just a bit too much information there, updated just a bit too often. I gave up trying to read some of the MSM collaborative blogs because there were too many posts per day; I felt I was always missing something, so stopped trying to catch any of it. Politics Home allows you to catch up with a previous day’s news - a tool I can see as becoming very useful - but it is clear that it is impossible to keep abreast of everything it offers. I hate to think I am missing out on half the functionality of a website just because I have too few hours in my day to enjoy it. (For what it is worth, here at Scribo we average about 4 or 5 posts per day; not too much, not too little.)

Politics Home Index (taking the name Phi, and using the Greek character as its logo for no apparent reason beyond the want of a logo) penetrates deep into the heart of opinion-forming in the UK. It polls 100 MPs, journalists, bloggers and others. It links to every good news source, making it important to bloggers and web editors alike. It provides unique information that will be reported in the press regularly - ConservativeHome’s monthly polling of Tory members is uniquely valuable. It provides unrivalled system of sending readers out from the homepage to dozens of media sources. It charts the day’s developments - more than any other site is capable of. Politicians’ media appearances are logged, and their dialogue quoted. How long will it be before journalists start scanning the Politics Home blog for inconsistencies or divisions of opinion, then quoting verbatim in their print articles?

Make no mistake, this website will change the way the print media makes its presence known online. I fear that it might have a negative impact on political blogging, but it will be an invaluable resource for bloggers.