Just to wish you all a Happy New Year.
I could well be logging the ups and downs of my Hogmanay on my Twitter account. You might have seen that I like Twitter so much that I have placed it above Delicious on my sidebar.
Archive: 2006 December
Will Patterson was on Radio Scotland yesterday discussing the rather sorry state of Scottish political blogging. You can hear it here.
Don’t know how sorry a state it’s in? Well, Will P said that (along with the brilliant CuriousHamster), doctorvee is one of the “blogs that everyone’s reading”. I get the feeling that anybody coming here for any top Guido Fawkes-style political blogging will have been sorely disappointed at the list of sprawling rants about moderately disappointing music that I’ve been more likely to post in recent weeks.
I don’t really see this place as a political blog any more. A couple of years ago I really wanted to be a political blogger. Now I can’t really be bothered. I do have the Scottish Blogging Roundup, and I’ve found myself holding back all of my little thoughts about politics for those posts rather than anything I write here. That’s maybe not a good thing. Perhaps I should be more impartial in the Roundup!
Anyway, it’s all very apt because I was actually planning another post on the Roundup blog about this issue. Why is there no Scottish Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale or Tim Ireland? Stay tuned at the Roundup blog for the post on that to come on Sunday, in place of this week’s roundup.
The Radio Scotland report painted a rather more sorry picture than is genuinely the case. It’s a bit of a stretch to say that there are only a “few dozen” Scottish blogs! There might only be a few dozen well-known blogs, but you can bet that for each of them there are at least a dozen buried underneath waiting to be discovered. For instance, Technorati lists 220 ‘Scottish’ bloggers, and they are only the people who know how to tag their blogs for Technorati! Who knows what else is hidden.
That was part of the reason for starting the Scottish Blogging Roundup: to discover more Scottish blogs, and to find a greater variety of views. I think it has partially succeeded, but there is a long way to go before anybody north of the border gets taken as seriously as the big guns like Tim Worstall, Iain Dale et al.
As they say in the radio report, there is a huge opportunity here with the Holyrood election coming up in May. But I seem to remember that the last Scottish Parliament election didn’t get an awful lot of attention in the media (certainly compared to a General Election), and the whole thing went by pretty much unnoticed. I hope the same thing doesn’t happen this year. Maybe we bloggers can make something happen.
Incidentally, for what it’s worth, my favourite Scottish political bloggers are Will P and David Farrer.
Update: I forgot to link to this excellent post on the same radio report at Scottish Political News, a good new-ish blog.
I have found, via Will P, that Councillor Terry Kelly has responded to the latest post I wrote at Scottish Blogging Roundup. He claims that he tried to leave a comment but couldn’t work out how to. (It’s dead easy by the way, just follow the ‘Comments’ link and type your comment and hit ‘Submit Comment’.) Anyway, he says he hopes for me to “put the record straight” so here we go. I’ll quote his post in full.
The above is a site which comments on other blogs, they seemed in the past to be harmless enough, if a bit pedestrian. Unfortunately I’m writing this on my blog because I’m on my own and have no computer expertise/back up and I couldn’t figure out how to reply to what they have been saying about me. I sometimes check who has visited my site and see what they have been commenting on, mostly it’s predictable right wing/nationalist drivel with a few exceptions, some of the exceptions are in fact right wing, but as yet no nationalists. Anyway I have no problem with that, there is however a pattern emerging which shows a hint of collusion which emerges when several of them accuse me of stifling debate and cutting out comments. I have tried to explain before that I will try to print comments if they are not abusive, in the past couple of weeks I have only removed three of these and printed everything else, no matter how puerile. This site seems to have joined in with these liars and is now, as far as I’m concerned not to be trusted, how easy is it to accuse me of this? they have nationalist stamped all over them, perhaps the site will put the record straight but I won’t hold my breath. I intend to print everything that’s printable. Why wouldn’t I when so much much of it makes my case for me.
Nationalist stamped all over me? Right-wing? What do you think? Has he never read anything I have to say, apart from the bit about him? Doesn’t seem like it to me.
Reckon he’ll be setting the record straight?
NB. I am posting this here because Scottish Blogging Roundup is not the place to be getting into these skirmishes.
Some new clothes! They still need to be ironed a bit though. I’ll sort out all the little niggles over the coming days. What do you think?
Update: Finally getting round to updating this post, which I meant to do yesterday. It’s crazy. It’s Christmas and I’m still running all over the place with no spare time. I’ll have to do something about that…
Anyway, the original plan for this new look was to use pink, green and yellow because I think those colours all work really well with each other. But I had also decided to have a dark background, because I fall in love with just about every website with a dark background. So that meant that the colours had to be a bit pale in order for the text to be readable.
At first I thought the green looked really rubbish, so I took it out. Then I thought, we’ll I’ve taken the green out so now the yellow looks out of place. So then the whole thing ended up being pink. Reactions (as you can see in the comments to this post) were a bit mixed. But anyway. I’ve taken away the pink header because it was probably a little bit too in-your-face.
Regular readers might remember that this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to use black / dark grey and pink. The previous times I gave up and reverted back to the same old blue. I am totally fed up of the blue now, so I’m determined to keep this dark design now. I thought quite hard about it, and I think (hope) it works. Now I’m pretty happy with the design and I just have some sweeping up to do. When I can be bothered.
BTW, I decided to call the theme Razzmatazz, because that’s the song I was listening to when it came to deciding a name, and I thought it fitted quite well.
This is what I got my brother for Christmas:
This is what my brother got me for Christmas:
I guess that’s almost the same as exchanging five pound notes.
1 comment