I was sorry to read that Kezia Dugdale has ‘retired’ from blogging. Jeff has the full details and an interview with Kezia herself about the matter.

It’s a blow to the Scottish political blogosphere for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Kezia was a great blogger in her own right. But perhaps more significantly she was one of the few Labour bloggers in a field that is increasingly dominated by nationalists.

She was not quite the only Labour blogger. There are a few others, but mostly centred around Edinburgh Council — with Ewan Aitken and Andrew Burns standing out.

For a focus on national politics though (either in the Scotland- or UK-wide sense), Kezia Dugdale was the one everyone would visit for the Labour view. Just as you’d visit Stephen Glenn for the Lib Dem point of view, Scottish Tory Boy for the Conservatives and James at Two Doctors for the Green view, Kezia was the Scottish Labour blogger.

Of course, one of those, Scottish Tory Boy, closed his blog last month — but he returned the following week! Kezia’s exit, though, does feel rather more final.

I have long admired Kezia for her blog. In her interview with Jeff, she makes a point about anonymity in blogging. She seems to believes that bloggers should not be anonymous. I happen to disagree with her on that matter. But there is no doubt that it would have been a safer option for her to adopt a snappy pseudonym and let rip. Instead, she had her name up there in big bold letters and even had a photograph. You’ve got to take your hat off to her for being principled enough to make her identity so clear.

No doubt this affected the tone and content of the blog. The aspect of Kezia Dugdale’s blog that I liked the least was the fact that it toed the Labour Party line rather too much for my liking. I wonder if, as the blogosphere’s best-known Labour face, she felt obliged to stick up for Labour a bit too much. Perhaps with one eye on the future.

At the same time, that all undoubtedly made her a target for cybernats. There is, as Kezia points out, a poisonous streak in certain parts of the blogosphere. As the primary voice for a Labour Party that is currently deeply unpopular, Kezia Dugdale was always going to be at the receiving end of some pretty robust, negative stuff. Just another reason why I was amazed at how she continued blogging regardless.

I think Kezia is wrong, though, when she says this about blogging:

…it’s a very seedy environment - the vast majority of bloggers operate anonymously. And with anonymity, accountability completely evaporates…
Blogging is no longer, in my view, a proper vehicle for debate. It’s been saturated by partisan venom and that can be quite debilitating.
I’ll write a post and then 95% of the comments that follow will be negative. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong every single time…

She is not totally wrong. But in my view, the problem is not with blogging per se. It is with comments. As I have argued here, people who run their own blogs tend to be articulate, reasoned people. The reason for that, as Will Patterson points out, is:

Sub-standard blogs, full of rubbish that’s plucked out of thin air, just won’t get read. Or they’ll get read a couple of times then people will move on. So weaker blogs get isolated, while stronger blogs gain a following. That way, every blogger is accountable to their readers.

In the comments, though, it is a different matter. Some people post in the comments simply because that way they are guaranteed an audience. Rather than make the effort to set up your own place — which people might not visit — to express your views, why not go some place else where you will definitely be heard? Of course, not all commenters are like this. But it is a sad fact of comments, that some people hang out there simply because they’re not good enough to sustain a blog of their own.

Luckily, this blog doesn’t have a big problem with comments. Of course, like all of us, I have received terrible, offensive comments that I simply couldn’t publish. But it’s not a regular problem that I have to deal with day-in, day-out as some bloggers no doubt have to. But it is a problem that the blogosphere as a whole has. It isn’t enjoyable to surf around Scottish websites and be confronted time and time again with swivel-eyed cybernattery.

I don’t like to blame this completely on anonymity. As I hinted at above, I think that there are perfectly valid reasons to wish to remain anonymous — or pseudonymous anyway. I certainly don’t think it’s feasible to expect all bloggers to go around using their real names all the time. But the comments issue is for another time (though I’ve already written about it here).

Whatever, I am quite sad that Kezia Dugdale has hung up her keyboard. A lot of bloggers need to take a break every so often, and a lot of the time bloggers on hiatus come back after a while. Blogging is slightly addictive. Once you’ve got used to using your little platform, it is difficult to stop using it forever. So hopefully Kezia will return to the blogosphere one day.

In the meantime, there is a huge void in the Scottish blogosphere. Who is going to stick up for Labour now?

Last week Ofcom gave ITV the go-ahead to cut regional output by 50%. Today ITV have duly gone and cut 1,000 jobs, almost half of which will come from regional news. ITV plc looks set to reduce the number of its regional news areas from 17 to nine.

It does make you wonder about the future of regional television, if it even exists. I have personally never been a fan of regional television, and I say that even having lived all my life in a very distinctive part of the UK. I might be the wrong person to ask though. I’m no fan of the “idiot box”. Next year, when F1 finally goes back to the BBC where it belongs, I will probably be able to say that I do not watch commercial television at all.

But regional television, it is fair to say, is not exactly pain-free viewing. More often that not, you can tell the programmes were made on a minuscule budget, and they are generally pretty naff.

Of course, back in the day, most ITV programmes were “regional” in the sense that they were made by one of the ITV franchisees. But the best programmes went out on the network and were therefore aimed at a national audience, with UK-sized aspirations and UK-sized budgets. As such, programmes that were aimed to serve a particular area were, almost by definition, sub-standard. I do wonder quite what the point of such programmes is.

It is slightly different for regional news. I can understand the appeal of having a separate bulletin dedicated to the news in a particular area. But the thing is that the regions are always too big for the bulletins to have a truly ‘local’ feel.

The ITV region I live in, STV Central, stretches from approximately where I live to Fort William while encompassing the massive populations of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde. Watching the bulletin, you would get the impression that hardly anything ever happens outside of Glasgow apart from the politics stuff which happens in Edinburgh. Even many of the political programmes, both on STV and BBC Scotland, are made in Glasgow rather than Edinburgh. If you live anywhere else, it can feel pretty alienating.

The BBC has never even attempted to split Scotland up into regions and Reporting Scotland essentially aspires to be a national news bulletin. The problem with even this is that there either isn’t enough news to report or there isn’t enough budget. Even Scotland, with its large area and separate institutions — most importantly, the Parliament — apparently doesn’t have enough going on to properly justify taking up 30 minutes of the schedule.

Whenever I watch Reporting Scotland, they seem to spend about five minutes per programme trailing what’s coming up later in the programme. Around five minutes into the programme, they are already talking about sport. And then they are normally only talking about football. Jimmy McPhee is in the airport today ready to depart for his meaningless match. Big whoop!

Another problem with regional news — especially on ITV — is the fact that the regions do not seem to be very logical. I’ve already talked about the huge area covered by STV Central. At some arbitrary point in Glenrothes, probably depending on how far behind the hill you are, you stop receiving STV Central and start receiving STV North / the old Grampian. Why is that then? Is Glenrothes more relevant to Aberdeen than to Glasgow? That’s not clear to me. Bearing in mind the fact that much of the population of Glenrothes is or was Glasgow overspill, it doesn’t seem quite right.

Of course, that is nothing compared to the abominable “Border” region which straddles England and Scotland and takes in the Isle of Man for good measure. That is an anachronism if ever there was one. You can tell the ITV regions were originally drawn up about sixty years ago because that would never wash today. I am no nationalist, though I am a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, and one has to wonder if it was a deliberate choice to have one ITV region that took in these three political entities — a 1960s equivalent of saying “North Britain”.

It is probably wrong for me speak for residents of the ITV Border region when I don’t live there, and I can well believe that there are many people who, having grown up with Lookaround, feel very attached to it. But for me, if I lived in the south of Scotland, with legislation affecting my life being made in Edinburgh, I think I would prefer to get my news from a Scottish city rather than Carlisle.

Of course, as Cllr Fraser Macpherson points out, that situation will be even worse under ITV’s new proposals. If ITV get their way, the Border and Tyne Tees regions will be merged. So Scots living in the Borders will not be getting their news from Carlisle — they’ll be getting their news from Gateshead.

The problems of the ITV Border region are recognised, with the existence of a ‘Border Scotland’ opt-out. From what I gather, this incorporates a news segment dedicated to Scotland and editions of Scotsport. What a faff that is though. Would it not just be more sensible to go the whole hog and recognise Scotland as a distinct entity? Every so often SMG express an interest in buying the Scottish bit of the ITV Border franchise. I kind of think they ought to get on with it, particularly if it’s only going to merge with Tyne Tees otherwise.

There are two big reasons why the situation is such a mess. One is geography. I am sure there are bureaucrats somewhere or other whose dream is for the ITV regions to be transformed so that they match the government office regions of the UK. At least that would be neater, and at least that way Scotland would have its own ITV region.

The problem is, those pesky hills get in the way. There is a clever map of the ITV regions on Wikipedia, and as you can see you can’t actually draw many meaningful borders between regions. The map looks like a mess.

The big reason, though, is of course money. Maybe back in the 1960s and 1970s owning an ITV franchise was a license to print money. Today, ITV leaks money like a sieve. Richard Havers traces the change back to the introduction of satellite television. This sucked advertising revenue away from ITV and spread it thinly across hundreds of smaller channels.

Since then, the ITV companies have merged and merged and merged until they became CarltonAndGranada before becoming the ITV plc we all love to hate. Scotland was not immune either as Scottish Television swallowed up Grampian to become SMG (now STV Group) and subsequently almost merged with UTV.

It now no longer makes financial sense for ITV companies to pour money into making news programmes. Economies of scale dictate that the regions will become fewer and bigger until they cease to be regional at all (and as I argue above, perhaps that has already happened).

I think it is time to give up on the idea of regional news programmes, at least on ITV (though Scotland can probably sustain it thanks to its status as a nation, relatively large population and separate political system). But if regional news must stay on television, perhaps it would be better to think of it as a public service that the BBC alone should carry out. I know that ITV is a PSB too, but they are considering giving that up because they think it costs them too much now. The writing is on the wall.

Besides, if I want to know the local news, where do I go? I certainly don’t watch Scotland Today if I want to find out what’s going on locally. I would buy The Fife Free Press or just visit a local news website. These options are probably far more cost-effective way to get local news.

Apart from that, dare I say that local news might be one arena where people turn more and more towards citizen journalists?

It’s not great. Technically, I’m still a bum — but I don’t have the time to blog? Something is wrong.

I guess this is all to do with that theory. If you have a demanding full-time job, go to night college, look after kids and do all the shopping and you have to do something, no bother, you just do it. If you are a bum who does nothing all day, gets up in the afternoon and spends two hours deliberating over what you should have for breakfast, you just get nothing done. I’m in the latter stage at the moment. I’m working on rectifying that, but it’s difficult to get going because I spend three hours a day deciding which font I should put on my CV.

It’s not that I haven’t been blogging. You may know that I have another blog which is dedicated to Formula 1. It’s that stage of the season where there is always something happening, even if it has to be contrived by the FIA. And since F1 is just a big soap opera with races in between, you don’t even need races to have loads to write about. So now I spend much of my time pontificating over the finer details of the debate over whether Buemi or Senna should get the second Toro Rosso race seat.

In the meantime, I’ve been neglecting this blog. And it becomes worse when you spend such a long time away from a blog, because then you feel this pressure to make sure the first post back is a good one. I could have easily written three or four posts by now, but I was worried about them for one reason or another. Blog depression, a truly 21st century disease.

It’s silly to get worried about it. But when you lose focus for a couple of days, suddenly it becomes a couple of weeks and then it becomes a struggle to avoid it becoming a couple of months. I’ve been blogging for a few years now though so I know how these things work. If I can just get going I will be back in the swing of things. But now it’s got to the stage where I have to either write this grovelling excuse or practically throw in the towel completely.

So I’m sorry, this is the one. I make no apology if I write about loads of nonsense for the next week or so until I get into the swing of things, although I do promise to write something or other here.

I recently bought myself a new toy, an Asus Eee PC. I did this partly so that I could get some blogging done when I’m not at home, perhaps if I’ve missed the train in Edinburgh and find myself having a couple of hours to kill (damn cheap day returns). I normally spend those couple of hours wandering around the streets of Edinburgh trying to convince myself I’m busy. Now I can tap some keys on my laptop trying to convince myself I’m busy.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that I’ll find any wifi hotspots so I am discovering the joys of Windows Live Writer. I heard rave reviews about that when it was first launched, but I had no need to use it because whenever I was at a computer I had internet access. Now I am using it on my Eee PC and can say I am quite impressed with it.

The thing about it is that I can now effectively blog in my bed. I have not yet decided if this is totally awesome or totally pathetic. In one sense, it is a great way to use that time I spend being unable to sleep doing something that I can pretend is vaguely useful. On the other hand, that is probably a sign of dire internet addiction.

I’m currently umming and aahing over whether I should buy a wireless router to accommodate this new toy. The current router is full up so when I’m blogging in my bed I’m actually doing it offline. And then the next day I have to faff around with the cables just to be able to do something with the excellent writing I did the night before. I can see that wearing pretty thin.

Anyway, that’s my comeback post. Sorry for disappointing.

I’ve recently been doing little bits and pieces helping out with the organisation of a very interesting event called ScotWeb2. It will take place on 31 October from 1000 to 1600 at the Holyrood Campus of Edinburgh University.

It will be an informal barcamp / unconference-style event. It’s being organised by Alex Stobart who works at the Scottish Government. Dave Briggs is also helping out and the event will be backed by BT.

I’ve mostly been trying to drum up interest among bloggers because it could also be a good opportunity for some bloggers to meet up and talk shop a bit. But it will be about much more than that. It will be about the application of web 2.0 technologies in general, in government, in the private sector and in the ‘third sector’.

Among the speakers will be Simon Dickson of Puffbox; Ross Ferguson of Dog Digital; Iain Henderson from MyDex; Stewart Kirkpatrick, former editor of Scotsman.com, now at w00tonomy; James Munro of Patient Opinion; and someone from BT to talk about Tradespace.

The best news is that attendance is open to anyone who is interested and it is free. All you have to do is sign up through Eventbrite and print out the ticket.

If you’re interested, keep an eye on the ScotWeb2 website. It’s not quite finished yet but it will be fleshed out soon enough.

More information from the Eventbrite page:

Web 2 seminar hosted by Edinburgh University, supported by BT and for all those interested in learning about Web 2 from practitioners, government and business users.

An informal, bar camp style event allowing participants to listen, network and share experiences with those who have designed and are managing Web 2 services.

Speakers and workshop leaders from Health, Business, Web design, Colleges and Universities, Social Enterprises, Social Media, Journalism, Government and Civic Society…

Other from Web 2 companies, Web 2 social enterprises, Web 2 designers ( public and private sector ), Not for Profit organisations, Academia, Business and the public sector will be there to run work-shops and explain their experience of Web 2…

There will be talks, opportunities to break out into discussions and to mix with those speakers who have used and built web 2 applications, and who are wishing to see change in the way users interact with their service providers and elecetd representatives.

There is an e-mail list here

If you are interested in web 2 as a subject covering communications, marketing, consultation, participation, engagement or service provision then this event will be of interest.

I know this sort of thing bores most people to tears, but I wanted to point out a change I’ve made to this blog. For a long time I’ve wanted to bring more attention to the stuff I do elsewhere — my other blogs, Twitter and the like. This blog still gets more visitors than my other blogs even though I can go quiet here for weeks.

At first I put up two different solutions on the one page (lifestream). But that was still out of the way, and it wasn’t very good either.

So instead I have decided to sweep up the sidebar and put in what I’m calling a ’sideblog’. Note that if you’ve come here from an RSS reader, it only appears on the homepage.

The sidebar aggregates my content from all sorts of different places — my other blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, Flickr and more. Comments that are posted on this blog also now reside there — although I haven’t yet worked out if this is a mistake or not. Everything else in the sideblog is ‘my’ content, but the comments are clearly not. So I might separate them out again later on. Any thoughts?

The sideblog is arranged in chronological order, but to save it from getting bombarded with content from one place (for instance, I uploaded 40-odd photographs to Flickr today), I’ve limited each site to having five entries at a time. The exceptions are Delicious which is limited to 10 and Last.fm which is limited to 1.

I built the sideblog using Yahoo! Pipes (which I found very difficult to get to grips with at first, but I eventually got it to do more or less what I wanted to do) and SimplePie. Some pretty desperate CSS magic got the icons appearing kind-of where I wanted them to.

Any thoughts on it? Hopefully it will be a good way of getting more fresh content here for the times when I am posting more at other places. I’ve kept a copy of the old sidebar though in case anyone is offended enough to want the old one back.

I don’t like to dwell on Iain Dale’s poll. As Longrider pointed out in the comments, it is of no real importance anyway. However, the first of Iain Dale’s category lists — media blogs — got me thinking. Why are there so few Scottish media blogs?

As far as I can make out, the list contains two blogs based on Scottish politics run by mainstream media organisations. One is the rather good Blether with Brian from the BBC’s Brian Taylor. The other is The Herald’s politics blog (though going by Iain Dale’s list it is only Douglas Fraser’s entries that meet with approval). I have to say that while I was very aware of Brian Taylor’s blog, I was only vaguely aware that The Herald had a political blog.

You might think that two entries in the top 30 of Iain Dale’s poll is not too bad. But when you look more closely at some of the other entries, things don’t look so good for the Scottish media. Wales has no fewer than four blogs in the list: David Cornock, Betsan Powys, Vaughan Roderick and 07:25 to Paddington.

Three of those come from the BBC Wales politics department. In Scotland, Brian Taylor is the only BBC political journalist that I know of that has a blog. Even then, I suspect that Brian Taylor was asked by BBC News Online to start his blog. Blogs by the political editors of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all started within a very short period of time of each other, as I recall.

What interests me more though is the poor showing of commercial media outlets. Wales is represented by a blog from WalesOnline. Also on Iain Dale’s list is a local blog run by David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News.

So where are the Scottish media blogs? I don’t think I would be alone in saying that I think The Herald’s blogs are rather limp and half-hearted. Of late, Douglas Fraser has only updated once every fortnight or so (although, yes, I know it’s the summer — but there have been a lot of Scottish political stories too). Robbie Dinwoodie is much the same.

Scotsman.com is even worse. It has no proper blogs. It does, from time to time, call articles blogs, but they have no permalinks and no comments — just a normal page with some date headings. Worse still, many opinion pieces are behind a paywall, which means that bloggers — even if they can be bothered to fork out to read it in the first place — will seldom link to them and engage in the debate.

I doubt things will improve in this area. Ever since Johnston Press took it over, they have seemed determined to treat Scotsman.com like it is the website for a tiny local newspaper. The perfectly good website was replaced with Johnston Press’s own template which is used for all of their local papers, just with content from The Scotsman shoehorned in. This kind of approach to the web, which will be an increasingly important part of The Scotsman’s business in the future, does not bode well.

I am sure the Sunday Herald used to have a separate site for blogging and comments. I don’t think I imagined it, but I can’t find any sign of it now. Mind you, I’m not surprised — it wasn’t very good.

It needn’t be like this. Despite claims from some that bloggers and the MSM are competing, this is simply not true. Blogs and the MSM are complementing. There are plenty of excellent, high-profile blogs run by media outlets based in London. The Spectator’s Coffee House, The Times’s Comment Central, The Telegraph’s suite of politics blogs, The Guardian’s politics blog and Comment is free, Nick Robinson and many other blogs from the BBC.

And Iain Dale’s list shows that they don’t have to be based in London, with respected blogs coming from other parts of the country. Why is there not more coming from Scotland?

It has to be said that the honourable exception is Brian Taylor. He seems to enjoy blogging and it is certainly a great place to catch up with recent political shenanigans. But what about everyone else?

Sorry, this is all navel-gazing stuff. But since I mentioned it already, I should probably point out that the results are up.

If this happened on the train I would probably be complaining quite vociferously. As it is, I lie between the Brian Taylor and Calum Cashley in Iain Dale’s top 40 Scottish political blogs, as voted for by readers.

More to the point, this list is definitive proof that this blog is the second best non-aligned non-MSM Scottish political blog (behind Ideas of Civilisation). I always knew it. (Any way to make the result sound more impressive, huh?)

Overall this blog is 16th, which is a dramatic fall of fourteen places from my previous position in this list. Still, I got off lightly. The person who was number 1 in that previous poll is nowhere to be seen in the top 40 now. Just goes to show what a fickle world this popularity malarkey can be.

I’m actually quite pleased for this blog to be up there still in 16th place given the increasingly sporadic nature of my blogging. I certainly can’t complain about the blogs above mine in the list, nor a few below mine. So thanks if you voted!

Another point to note is that Scottish Roundup is number 31 (in the week that it celebrates its 100th roundup too). Not bad for a blog that has next to no original content. Scottish Roundup is run by me, but it is a thoroughly collaborative effort with many people chipping in. So if you have contributed to Scottish Roundup before, give yourself a pat on the back.

I was pleased to see that Scottish Unionist named me as his number one Scottish political blog. My increasingly sporadic and rambling posts probably do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as, say, Ideas of Civilisation or Jeff Breslin, but I will not complain!

Better than being number 1 in Scottish Unionist’s list, though, was the testimonial he gave this blog:

Non-partisan analysis from a thought-provoking contrarian. Fantastic.

Reading that particularly pleased me because it confirmed that I am achieving pretty much everything I have come to wish to achieve by blogging. Over the years I’ve been blogging (since 2002, would you believe), I have spent some time thinking about what I want to achieve as a blogger, what makes bloggers good and what sets them apart from the mainstream media.

One of my conclusions has been that there is no point in being predictable if you are a blogger. There is no point in setting up a little platform to express yourself only to be boring when you climb onto it.

One of the biggest crimes any writer can commit is to give you what you expect. When I started to go off newspapers, it was because the op-ed pages are always full of clichés, sloppy partisanship and ideological tub-thumping. More often than not, you can read the heading, see who wrote it, then practically write the column yourself.

Simply, what is the point in reading what Polly Toynbee has to say about rich people? Because you certainly won’t learn anything. I can only think that the only people who read Polly Toynbee are those who take delight in fisking her on one side, and those who are seeking to have their own prejudices confirmed on the other.

As a blogger — i.e. someone who says to people, “look at me and listen to what I have to say” — I owe it to my readers to be interesting. There would be no point in me writing something bland and predictable — and that is one of the reasons why my posting can become quite sporadic at times. Better to say nothing at all than to say something boring, I think. If it ever got to the stage where I stopped offering anything different, I would find myself with no readers left.

That perhaps means that I am tempted to exaggerate my views and emphasise the areas where I am out of phase with the general public. Indeed I do sometimes use “artistic license”. Often I will put forward what may be seen as an unusual view, though I do so more to ask the question and raise the point rather than because I actually agree with it. However I certainly don’t lie or put my name to something that I don’t believe in.

This is an extension of my “real life” self. I often find myself, almost unwittingly, arguing against my own beliefs in the instance where I agree with the person I’m having a conversation with. There is little that worries me more than agreement. Disagreements are what makes the world go round, and it can all get a bit too cosy if I find myself agreeing too often.

This isn’t because I am a combative person, because I am not. But I am genuinely scared of groupthink. If we all agree about things and fail to challenge received wisdom, we will soon find ourselves being the victim of the scenario we failed to foresee. Either that or we will find ourselves stunted by complacency. Debating issues keeps the mind sharp, focusses attention on why we believe something and reminds us why we reject the alternative. In short, disagreement is a good thing and should be encouraged in my view!

There is also the prospect that people are jumping on the bandwagon and are agreeing for the sake of agreement. You might say that I disagree for the sake of disagreement, but I think that my approach is the safer option. Almost inevitably, the truth lies somewhere between two extremes and I think it is wise to experiment with the balance to see where it lies.

So I was delighted to be described as a non-partisan, thought-provoking contrarian. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think, though, that most of us bloggers know all this. The blogosphere is a wonderful place to have a discussion. Our world is a normally respectful one where alternative ideas are discussed with seriousness. It can be a great platform for people who have ideas that are not well represented in the mainstream media.

That is one of the reasons for the existence of that gulf between Joe Blogs and Joe Public. We know there is no point in just regurgitating the views we see in the mainstream media. Our role is to question the mainstream media and consider the alternatives.

The blogosphere is no place for boilerplate clichés and ideological tubthumping. Boring, predictable writers are ignored in this great forum of interesting debate. So let’s see some more contrariness!

Just in case any readers here haven’t seen it, Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting has organised a little get-together for bloggers — and it’s happening tomorrow.

Despite the fact that I have been blogging for a slightly worrying six years, I have never met up with any other bloggers (except for those I knew anyway who happen to also blog). There have been a couple of close encounters in the past with two people, but no chit-chat was exchanged and I was totally oblivious both times. So this will be the first time I’ve met up and had a chat with any other bloggers.

I guess I will be the baby of the crew because I reckon everyone else that’s going is at least a few years older than I am. Believe it or not, this will also be the first time I have ever attended any event vaguely related to the Edinburgh Festival.

Here are the full details in case you’ve missed them. We meet at around 7pm at Udderbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh. Then we might go to see Britishness.

Check out SNP Tactical Voting for the full info.

Well after the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was deemed to be impressive (apparently), it was hard to escape the self-pitying among Brits. “You just know ours will be rubbish compared to this.”

Well it transpires that London 2012 will be okay after all. Just a day after it emerged that fireworks were faked for the television audience, it has been revealed that a pretty singer was actually miming. Apparently the girl who actually did sing munted a bit was not as flawless.

This is great news for the Brits! Because if there is one thing our media excels at (except for ridiculous hyperbole and a breathtaking disregard for privacy) it is fakery. All we need to do now is put Ant and Dec in charge of the fireworks and Liz Kershaw in charge of the music. Shoehorn in a premium rate phone-in competition somewhere and it will be brilliant.

For those who haven’t put the two and two together, my dad is Jack Stephen who can sometimes be found in the comments on this site. (I can tell you, it’s strange calling my dad ‘Jack’ just so that other people can follow the conversation properly.)

Over the weekend I set up a blog for him at which he posts as his science fiction writing alter-ego, Jack Deighton. It’s called A Son of the Rock.

I did the “gold” and black masthead because I thought he would appreciate that being a fan of Dumbarton Football Club. However, coming up with a complementary colour for the links was a tough job. Despite a plethora of suggestions I received on Twitter and Facebook (thank you all), nothing looked right to me. Perhaps that’s because I just don’t like the mustard colour. In the end I settled on the blue.

The eagle-eyed among you will spot that the theme is basically the one I use for Scottish Roundup but tweaked a bit (which, in fairness, is in turn just the default WordPress theme tweaked). That was part of the problem with the blue links. If it was scrolled down and I couldn’t see the masthead it reminded me far too much of Scottish Roundup. Hopefully I’ve tweaked it enough to keep it fresh and different.

Incidentally, my dad is now the third member of the family to have started blogging. He joins me (obviously) and my brother who blogs at Onebrow along with his girlfriend Laura.

This week a university lecturer, Ken Smith, suggested that spelling “mistakes” should be accepted as variants. This has upset Ideas of Civilisation and Colin Campbell among others.

I side with Ken Smith on this occasion though. I hate spelling mistakes and love to point them out. Only yesterday I saw a greengrocers’ apostrophe and instinctively growled. But that is only because I am a cheeky wee pedant. Deep down, I know that the rules of the English language are strange and, ultimately, pointless.

What is the purpose of language? I would say language is what allows people to communicate with each other. Accordingly, rules should develop naturally, and as long as the two parties communicating understand each other all is well. However, for grammar fascists, language rules are just an opportunity to crack the whip.

It is worth remembering that a strict one-size-fits-all suite of language rules is a very modern concept. Standardised spellings only came in when some smart fellow decided to become the first lexicographer and hoodwink people into believing his services were vital.

William Shakespeare did not even have a standardised spelling for his own name. Was he wrong? If we follow the joke that the easiest mark in an exam is for spelling your name correctly, it looks like Shakespeare himself would have failed his English GCSE.

Now, hopefully you have noticed that I like to take care over my spelling and suchlike. But this is a personal choice that I took because I believe that adhering to these rules allows me to reach the widest audience possible. That, and it means I don’t get bombarded by complaints from snobs.

If someone else is content to spell things incorrectly but can still convey their message to its intended recipient then that is their personal choice. There is nothing wrong with people deciding how they can speak and write for themselves.

Language has always evolved naturally, and I see no reason why that should stop now. The purpose of a dictionary is to record language as it is written, not to tell people how to write it. If different people spell things in different ways, then that is just part of life’s rich tapestry.

After all, we tolerate and even celebrate — and rightly so — variations in pronunciation in the English language. Only the snobbiest of snobs would demand that everyone speaks RP. In this age where regional accents are celebrated, we usually find we have no trouble understanding people. So why should people also be expected to write in the same bland, standardised, colourless RP all the time?

What gets me is the sheer snobbery of some people who insist on “correct” spellings. Who is to say that you are right and they are wrong? Closing your ears and stomping your feet complaining about how thick the other person is does not get anyone anywhere. Is there not room for some give and take, just as there is when having a conversation with people who have a different accent?

Ideas of Civilisation attempted to show how ludicrous Ken Smith’s suggestion is by filling his post with a myriad of misspellings. Of course, were Ken Smith’s idea to take hold and language was allowed to evolve naturally, we almost certainly would not face a wholesale dumping of the dictionary, with standards completely replaced by arbitrariness. Instead, new standards would emerge while the most common misspellings would be tolerated.

Txt spk is the perfect example. Snobs may turn their nose up at it, but there is no denying that this development which emerged naturally has had an important influence in simplifying the language and removing barriers to communication. In fact, it is an ingenious solution to the problem we all face, stuck with the QWERTY system which was originally designed to slow typists down. What is wrong with people using their initiative to speed things up again?

Then there is the text message itself, where brevity is key. Messages are limited to 160 characters which means you have to keep it short if you want to avoid being charged double or even triple your normal rate. The new standard of abbreviations is a clever and natural way to evade this restriction.

That is not to mention instant messaging, where speed is as important as clarity. When you are having a fast-paced IM conversation, it is only sensible to take the odd short cut. It should be no surprise that in an age where we rely more heavily than ever on inefficient keyboards and restrictive technologies that new standards should emerge.

Moreover, what is wrong with “embarassing”, “beleive” or “pleasent”? Or even the odd “there” instead of “their” or vice-versa? You would still know exactly what I meant were I to use those spellings. Any exam marker with two brain cells to rub together would know that as well. If he were to mark down someone for putting one ‘r’ instead of two even though the meaning is still perfectly clear, then that would make him a petulant, authoritarian shit.

Well it seems as though everyone else has been doing it, especially on the Scottish blogs. It’s all in aid of the 2008-9 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK by Iain Dale. He’s asking everyone to vote you see.

Last year, quite incredibly, this blog was named as the number 2 Scottish political blog thanks to Grant Thoms of Tartan Hero fame. Some will say that this blog is indeed a load of number 2, so the position is pretty apt. But I would be amazed if I repeated the feat this year.

So vote for me now!

As a few other bloggers have done, I will reveal my top ten political blogs. If nothing else, it fills a bit of space here. You might also be interested in my recent post on ten excellent blogs.

It’s not easy choosing just ten great blogs — and choosing the order of them is even harder. But you probably know that. I tend to go through love / hate (or at least ‘love / indifferent’) relationships with most blogs. No doubt this list would look very different if I compiled it next week.

1. Stumbling and Mumbling
2. SNP Tactical Voting
3. UK Polling Report
4. Political Betting
5. Mr Eugenides
6. J. Arthur MacNumpty
7. Ideas of Civilisation
8. Holyrood Chronicles
9. Freedom and Whisky
10. Liberal England

One to file under “why on earth didn’t I think of that?”. Ewan Spence has analysed each of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest entries in Last.fm.

For those who don’t know, Last.fm is a smart website that tracks your music (or podcast) listening habits. It can generate recommendations for you, but I joined the site almost four years ago. Back in those days when it was called Audioscrobbler (before it merged with Last.fm which was a separate website with a slightly different purpose) so I’m just there for all the wonderful stats about my taste in music. (In case anyone’s interested, my profile is here.)

Ewan Spence took a look at the stats for each of the songs in this year’s ESC to see how they measured up. Regular readers may remember that I wrote a post a couple of months back debunking the theory that the ESC is dominated by political bloc voting. So I was pleased to see Ewan Spence’s analysis which suggests that broadly the most popular songs as measured by Last.fm are also the songs that tended to do well in this year’s ESC.

However, there is one mega outlier. And it’s a groovy French man who is way out in front on the Last.fm chart — Sébastien Tellier.

If you remember my post about bloc voting in the ESC, you might also remember that even though there is no political voting, I concluded that France woz robbed. I wasn’t the only one either — I saw that quite a few people liked Sébastien Tellier’s song in particular.

I still see people discussing him from time to time. In fact, I have one friend who likes to talk about Sébastien Tellier quite often. He refers to him as “the hairy Jarvis Cocker”. From what I can gather, Sébastien Tellier had built up quite a following prior to Eurovision. His latest is his third album and is produced by one of the guys from Daft Punk. And back in the day he toured with Air.

Ewan Spence suggests there might be some tricky goings-on with Tellier’s numbers such as a Last.fm player on his website or something. I think it might be down to the fact that Sébastien Tellier is quite popular, so actually merits the attention on Last.fm. In fact, I have contributed to Sébastien Tellier’s numbers on Last.fm as I bought the album Sexuality on the strength of his Eurovision song ‘Divine’.

So, was Sébastian Tellier robbed? Yes and no. Simple following alone can’t explain the discrepancy. While Tellier has some fans, the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest — Russia’s Dima Bilan — is a major pop star with several number ones across eastern Europe.

I think it might have a lot to do with the type of person who uses Last.fm though — i.e. people who really, really like music. A slightly odd French electronic artist is just the sort of thing that would probably appeal to your average Last.fm user more than the average person on the street for whom music is like wallpaper.

Take a look at the this week’s Last.fm chart. Like Ewan Spence’s chart, it bears a vague resemblance to actual popularity, but with a few oddities along the way.

Where, for instance, is the UK’s biggest selling artist of the year so far, Duffy? 166th — behind a lot of pretty obscure artists (by which I mean people I’ve never heard of). I bet if you did a televote Duffy would be near the top.

The point is that Sébastien Tellier is great. But it was a bit like the French equivalent of the UK entering Aphex Twin (213th in Last.fm, ahead of the likes of Christina Aguilera, Norah Jones and Lily Allen) — right down to having everyone on stage looking like him. It would be great, but most would be left scratching their heads.

So hurrah for Sébastien Tellier. Eurovision may have ignored him, but that is understandable. Those on Last.fm can handle its odd French electronic music. One more time!

The other day I received a comment from the person who runs the By-Elections blog and this website about by-elections. I don’t have any leaflets but I’m happy to help out. I’m sure a few activists, or anyone who happens to live in the Glasgow East area, who are reading this might have a few spare leaflets.

Hi

I run the By-elections blog

http://by_elections.blogspot.com/

I have just found your coverage of the Glasgow East by-election.

I also help run the By-election archive website at

http://www.geocities.com/by_elections/

Would it be possible for you to help us archive the leaflets from Glasgow East?

please contact me via the website or the blog if you can help with scans or by sending us the leaflets for us to scan.

I look forward to your coverage of the result.

Thanks

My oh my, it’s certainly been getting heated in the Scottish political blogosphere of late. The Glasgow East by-election has captivated us all — and it’s captivated some people a bit too much.

Councillor Andrew Burns can’t remember it being like this during the Dunfermline West by-election. If I was in a cheeky mood I might say that is because Lib Dems are just big soft hippies. (Lib Dem Stephen Glenn disapproves of the current blogospheric Labour–SNP tensions.)

But I think the Glasgow East brouhaha is more to do with the fact that, uniquely, both of the main parties in the running are severely on the back foot. Labour are in big trouble because there is the possibility that this safer-than-safe seat will be lost. This in itself represents a major blow for Labour and they are scrabbling defensively to save something from this election.

Meanwhile, the SNP are in big trouble because they started the campaign by confidently predicting a win. When that possibility is by no means certain, they are going on the attack to try and make sure the victory happens and that a narrow loss (which otherwise would have been a massive coup for the SNP) is avoided.

Jeff has heard it rumoured that the blogosphere will be a prominent feature of the Sunday newspapers this weekend as the fuss over this post by Kezia Dugdale continues to rumble on. In the comments over at Stephen Glenn’s blog, Jeff pointed out that by-elections bring out the worst in all of us (by which he means them). “Delightfully so.”

I’m sorry to say that I’m not so delighted (maybe that is my fluffy Lib Dem tendency taking over). In fact, the rough and tumble of party political debate is one of the things that has made me more apathetic about party politics in recent years.

Two or three years ago I used to get involved in all that verbal jousting with party political types. I’m ashamed to say that I was quite rude once or twice in a manner which was uncalled for. But I did get quite annoyed at the way some people seemed to want to inflame the situation and it was inevitable that tensions would boil over at some point or another. I didn’t really enjoy it. In fact it angered me.

Then I realised what was going on. These people actually enjoy the rough and tumble. They live and breathe it. That is why they became politicians. They love to tear metaphorical lumps out of their opponents rather than debating in a calm manner. If they say something below the belt, they don’t necessarily mean real harm. It is a kind of pantomime. A verbal boxing match.

Then I looked at the nasty election campaigns that political parties so often take part in. The relentless negativity and attacking made me wonder if this is what politicians are really in it for. Just as a boxer chooses to box because he likes to fight, a politician chooses his profession because he likes to fight. Except that a politician doesn’t have the physical prowess.

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with mental battles. This is what debating really is: a verbal chess game. But it’s okay to do it in a debating society. Is it so cool to do it under the pretence that you’re doing it for the good of the people?

Now onto the right storm in a teacup that is Kezia Dugdale’s blog post. Now I don’t know if the rumour is true or not. I err towards the notion that it’s true. Jeff now seems to think it’s true, and I’m sure he has ways of finding out (relative to me anyway — I have no contacts and no-one ever tips me off about anything *sniff*). Plus I doubt that Kezia Dugdale would post something like that unless it was true.

Clearly, though, her post was ambiguously worded in order to have maximum impact. She made it sound as though the SNP cabinet minister in question (who, it transpires, is Nicola Sturgeon) was completely at fault when it seems as though BBC Scotland were probably equally at fault. Now, according to Tom Harris, Nicola Sturgeon’s big crime is trying to wave the security man away. How awful of her!!

Regardless of the merits of the story (”tittle-tattle” was mentioned in the first comment on Kezia Dugdale’s post, and I wouldn’t disagree with that), I have personally had great mileage out of it as I have been gleefully repeating the story to my non-blogging friends. Incidentally, I have equally gleefully been telling the stories of Labour’s various mishaps as well, before any nats start jumping up and down.

Nonetheless, the story is just a bit of fun really and it doesn’t demonstrate that Nicola Sturgeon has made any serious error of judgement (although, as I said, the original post was ambiguously-enough worded to make you think it might have). In short, it is just a light-hearted sort of “and finally”-style election story if you ask me. A Prescott punch-level story, as Two Doctors points out.

The fact that the next day Nicola Sturgeon apparently asked Kezia Dugdale to retract the post says much more about Nicola Sturgeon than the original post said about Kezia Dugdale if you ask me. What was a minor post on a blog that didn’t say very much about the SNP is now apparently on the verge of being big news (or bigger than it was anyway).

The story has certainly snowballed since then and the Scottish blogosphere has been in about as much of a frenzy as I have ever seen it in. It all reminds me of the Schillings scenario. Wouldn’t it have been better for Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP to take the moral high ground and ignore it?

I have to point out that I quite admire Kezia Dugdale. I am no apologist for Labour, as regular readers will know. But you have got to take your hat off to her. Even though, because of all that rough and tumble that I dislike, no-one enters politics unless they have a thick skin, Kezia Dugdale has to take a lot of flak.

She is practically the only major Labour voice in a Scottish blogosphere that is increasingly dominated by SNP macho-men (dare I call them ‘cybernats’?) who are poised, waiting to throw stones at Labour. I and many others would give up in that situation. You’ve got to give Kezia Dugdale credit for perseverance if nothing else.

Even though her blog is ridiculously partisan and never very critical of the Labour party, you can easily level this criticism at two or three SNP blogs as well (Tartan Hero and Calum Cashley spring to mind). Ideas of Civilisation had a really interesting post about this. Why do people blog about politics, particularly when they are often so polemical?

Related to that, Views from North Britain reminds us that blogging is still a minority activity. So any amount of posting on a blog is unlikely to have much of an effect.

Incidentally, how come Nicola Sturgeon always seems to be at the centre of these internet rumours come election time? I seem to remember during last year’s Scottish Parliament elections the story of her very rude nickname was flying relatively freely…

Update: I have just seen this post from Holyrood Watcher which pretty much sums up the situation.