I’ve just been watching news coverage of that train derailment in Cumbria. Incidentally, Sky News’ coverage was awful. They had somebody from Virgin Trains on the phone and the questions were unforgivably banal.

Presenter: So, can you tell us something about the train? How many carriages were there on the train, because there seems to be some confusion as to whether there were six or nine carriages.
Virgin Trains man: There are nine carriages.
[Long pause.]
Presenter: Err, can you tell us something more about the train?
[I switch back to News 24.]

BBC News 24 was slightly more watchable. I was thinking about my post about user generated content in the mainstream media. This is exactly the sort of news story where UGC works well.

Quite soon after the story has broken we have seen photographs taken from inside an upside-down carriage that helps illustrate the seriousness of the crash. Of course, the eyewitness accounts are also helpful, although I’m not sure if this properly counts as user generated content (really they are just interviews).

But then News 24 went and ruined it by flashing a “Speak Your Brains Have Your Say” logo at the bottom of the screen and spending a short while reading out viewers’ emails. The first one was quite interesting — a viewer had seen what looked like a flash of lightning from the train line, which they now took to be a train crash. Hardly earth-shattering stuff, but at least it’s not totally banal.

But after that they really started scraping the barrel. The usually unflappable Tim Willcox was stumbling as he struggled to find more interesting emails:

“Err, and we have another one… here…, umm. “Just seen the train crash. Genuine best wishes to all of those involved”… umm. Yess. Do keep those emails coming in.”

This illustrates my point perfectly. With the photographs from inside the train, viewers saw an instance where UGC genuinely added something to the story. Just minutes later, the mundane emails showed up the pitfalls of relying on viewers’ input too much.

And, as Ryan Morrison pointed out in the comments to my other post, it was probably a sign that it was time to move on to another story, even if the train derailment news is still developing.

Some people seem dead set on framing the whole issue as some kind of colossal battle between the mainstream media and citizen journalism. But bloggers often depend on the mainstream media for its stories — with a few notable exceptions of course. And by the same token, the mainstream media depends on citizens more and more to send in images of big news events such as the London bombings.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately it has become a sickeningly trendy thing for news outlets to do now. Now every time a turkey sneezes it’s all, “Send us your pictures to news@sky.com”, or even worse, “Have your say by recording yourself on your 3G phone.” I mean really. UGC has become a gimmick used by news channels to make them look all hip and cool.

Channel Five News seems particularly keen on the idea of citizen journalism. But they are so eager to push it forward that they end up completely missing the point. For one thing, one report I saw was an irredeemably dull item about cycle lanes. Not cycle lanes in general. Cycle lanes in one gentleman’s town.

Clearly, this man was quite concerned about cycle lanes (I can’t remember why, it was so boring). But what had obviously happened was that he emailed some special “Speak your brains” email address and some producer picked it up and said, “Great! That’s a really boring story, just like what them citizen journalists are into. Let’s do it!” And then they sent along a professional production crew and got this chap to talk about cycle lanes.

But that isn’t citizen journalism at all. The production crew probably made the decision that he would cheesily present the whole item in his cycling gear, riding down the cycle lanes and then “happening to bump into a camera” and mouth off about cycle lanes in a monotone fashion.

All they needed was a pointless two-way and that would have been it — citizen journalism becomes everything that’s bad about the mainstream media. Essentially it was a normal news report in every way, except that it was presented by somebody with little or no television experience. This is more like Points of View than blogging. In the blogosphere, this “story” about cycle lanes would never have attracted any attention whatsoever. Channel Five decided to put it on its prime time news programme.

The point for me about blogging is that normal-ish people have a big conversation. Sometimes they write about their own experiences and create their own stories about the world around them. People eventually find like-minded people and share their experiences, debate and have a conversation. Channel Five just took some guy with a hobby horse and plonked him in front of a camera.

Radio Five Live recently had some boring thing called “Your Five Live” or something. I think it lasted an entire week. And it was terrible. All week they were trailing a special debate to be. chaired by that voice of reason Stephen Nolan, about “the issue you told us concerned you the most”. Yes, you guessed it — immigration. That issue that seems to attract the regular Five Live phone-in callers but doesn’t seem to fuss people in the blogosphere that much.

I didn’t listen to the debate. I would probably have found it too depressing. It would have been a carnival of the knuckle-draggers. Maybe I am being a snob. Surely these are normal people who have every right to voice their opinion. Well, yes. But any old fool can rant down a microphone.

As I said, the point about blogging is that you have a proper discussion and a debate. Sometimes Five Live manages this, but more often it doesn’t. You just get somebody inflicting us with his verbal diarrhoea before being cut off by the presenter because it’s time for the news.

And just have a look at BBC News 24 or Sky News. Large chunks of the day are often dedicated to “Have your say” “debates”. What this actually means is numbskulls sending in emails and some editor somewhere picking the juiciest ones which a presenter then reads one line of. What you get is half a dozen emailers all of which have their own personal chips on their shoulder — but no conversation, no debate, no intelligence.

A new programme on Channel 4 caught my eye this weekend. It’s called Homemade, and it actually bills itself as YouTube for the television. People generate their own content and submit it to Channel 4. But once again this completely misses the point. The point about YouTube is that you decide for yourself what you want to watch.

Homemade is still put together by a bunch of television professionals who have chosen what they would like us to watch. The viewer gets no choice in the matter here. And we could especially do without the annoying Dave Berry presenting links between all of the clips.

All we have now is a rag-bag of items filmed on poor-quality cameras. Presumably the producers of Homemade thought the randomness and low quality images was what made YouTube popular. Well, not so. Most people just use YouTube to watch actual television programmes anyway.

The mainstream media needs to realise what user generated content can actually be useful for. At the moment, it is just a trendy gimmick — and its uses get more annoying by the week. People will always want television stations to create quality, big-budget programmes. If people wanted something home made they would watch YouTube, not Channel 4.

As for the news programmes, they need to be more aware that their job is to report the big news stories with expert analysis. If people wanted to know what people on the street thought, they would just read a blog. As things stand, user generated content on news programmes are toe-curlingly embarassing and always encourage me to switch off.

That is not to say that citizens can’t have an input in the news. Images of Concorde on fire and the inside of the bombed train in London genuinely added to the story, and professionals were not in a position to film these. That is the sort of cooperation between “citizens” and the “mainstream media” that can work brilliantly. The rest is just awful, gimmicky rubbish.

This post by Kevin Anderson is very interesting. The key quote:

The mainstream media believes that “user-generated content” has to come through their sites, their walled gardens of tightly controlled participation, so they miss the vastly larger opportunity that exists on the internet as a whole.

Tim Montgomerie of 18 Doughty Street and Conservative Home was asked about a concern that some people might have about the blogosphere — that people who don’t actually know very much about what they’re writing about can gain a lot of influence. Montgomerie responded by saying that the bloggers that got the most attention were the people who did know something about what they’re writing about.

When I was interviewed for a piece on Radio Scotland last year, I also suggested that the most successful bloggers were people who probably would have been well-known campaigners or journalists anyway (although as I recall, this bit wasn’t used in the broadcast). I cited Iain Dale as an example. His blog is one of the biggest around at the moment, and he was clearly a big figure on the political scene before blogging took off.

Will Patterson then spoiled the whole illusion by going on to suggest that I am one of the bloggers that everybody reads. Well I have to hold my hands up and say that I am one of those bloggers who don’t really know much about what they’re writing about.

Clearly, the idea that “those who do know” are the only successful (or even worthwhile) bloggers is only part of the story about blogs. If it were the case that big names are the only important ones, citizen journalism wouldn’t be seen as important and The Long Tail wouldn’t exist in the blogosphere.

To ask for bloggers to be expert policy analysts misses the big point about blogging, which is that any old Joe Blogs can get out and express his opinion to a wide audience. “How boring,” you might think — and you might be right. I find it absurd that anybody should read my blog. I am only 20 for a start, and I’m a very mundane person. I have almost no life experience and I’m certainly not in any position to be telling Mr X to do y.

But that’s not the point. If you say, “well, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so why should his opinions matter?”, then you might as well throw the whole idea of liberal democracy out of the window. The great thing about blogging is that it is ordinary people — some more expert than others — who are getting their thoughts out there in the open.

I used to struggle to understand why I like blogs so much while I’ve ended up getting less and less of my news via traditional outlets. Recently it struck me. It is common for people to say that all politicians are lying, spinning or toeing the party line. The reason they do this, of course, is that they do not appear on the news in a personal capacity — they do so as a representative of their political party. Of course they will be expected to toe the party line. They would probably be out of a job if they didn’t.

But the same goes for everybody that appears on the news. If it isn’t a politician it will be somebody representing some other organisation — a pressure group, a trade union, a business, whatever. Even when I or Will P or any other bloggers crop up on the news, it is only in our capacity as representatives of (or experts on) the blogosphere.

I’ll sit there watching the news thinking, “can I really believe this person?” They are all experts in their field for sure. But they are also in their ivory towers, seeing things from their blinkered perspectives. Isn’t it strange that ordinary people — who, by definition, make up the vast majority of the population — are seldom properly represented in the mainstream media apart from in some uncomfortable ‘Speak Your Brains’ segment?

The fact that ordinary people who don’t necessarily have an agenda to push or a party line to toe are gaining some influence should be seen as refreshing, not bothersome. I know I’d much rather read the opinions of ordinary people rather than somebody with an agenda to push. I think most other people do as well. Like I said, I am a mundane person and certainly not in a position to be an expert on anything. But plenty of people still read my blog.

Mark Lawson, in an article he wrote having obviously only ever read about half a dozen blogs in his life, once said that:

At its worst, blogworld most resembles a radio phone-in for leftwing men but without a Victoria Derbyshire or Brian Hayes to interrupt the callers who lose the thread and start to free-associate.

This is part of the problem a lot of bloggers have with the “mainstream media”. ‘Ordinary people need to know their place, and we journalists have to be there to let them know when to shut up.’ So you have an letters page in the newspaper which is supposed to represent the views of the ordinary readers — which it does, but only at the say so of an editor. And you have radio phone-in shows where ordinary listeners are often summarily cut off in their prime.

A lot of the people who phone up a radio station do often deserve to be cut off. But here is another magical thing about blogging. We bloggers are having proper debates. We don’t have to worry about squeezing our point in before the news. If somebody disagrees with us they can simply respond either in the comments or on their own blogs.

Soon enough you find out who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t. Poorly-formed opinions have to be revised as they are challenged by others. What we have is the wisdom of crowds. Even though many (but by no means all) of us may not be experts, bad ideas soon get weeded out. This is proper, adult (usually) discussion between — whisper it quietly — ordinary people.

That should be embraced, not snootily ridiculed.

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 do not believe we are more than two or three elections away from the moment when some commercial channels will be ready to proclaim: “We win it for Tony, Dave, Ming (or whoever).”

Grade notes the difference in culture between the print media and broadcasters:

In the UK, we have developed quite different expectations of different media. With broadcasting, balance and impartiality have been statutory requirements: democracy is judged to be served by the absence of bias and partisan editorial agendas. For print, with its long history of struggle against state censorship, democracy is seen to be served by freedom of expression, and is characterised by partisan editorialising.

Television channels are still fairly heavily regulated by Ofcom. This is designed to keep television news impartial, which is said to ensure a healthy democracy. But were newspapers to be regulated in this way it would be rightly called an undemocratic suppression of free speech.

It might seem like a discrepancy. But up until recently, broadcasters were part of a privileged elite. A television channel could have a lot of power. You don’t have to go back far to find an era where the UK had only three and a half channels. People would be stuck with what they were fed. Television audiences of over 20 million, although almost unheard of today, were not that unusual back then.

A license to broadcast was a powerful thing to have. It was a privilege, and with that privilege came responsibilities. As such it was reasonable to regulate these channels’ news output. Otherwise just two or three companies would have had a ridiculous amount of influence over the electorate.

It was very different with newspapers. In theory, anybody could publish a newspaper. It certainly had fewer barriers to entry than broadcasting did. As such, press freedoms were cherished. A diversity of opinions unimaginable to broadcasting was available in print.

Today it’s a very different story. In just a few years it will be the norm for every television owner to have access to a few dozen different channels. There are hundreds available on Sky. It is now cheaper to run some television stations than it is to publish a magazine. And there are certainly more television channels than there are national newspapers.

The traditional analogue terrestrial channels are seeing audiences dwindle. The BBC, ITN, even Sky are all becoming less powerful. Competition has increased greatly. Viewers have so many choices, and broadcasting is no longer so much of a privilege. Yes, many of the new channels have been set up by the traditional broadcasters — but this is more of a damage limitation exercise than anything else.

But it’s not just the advent of digital television that is giving the traditional media companies food for thought. A far bigger problem is being posed by the internet. Young people spend far more time on websites like YouTube and MySpace than watching television. We live in an age where the world seems to be increasingly run by large, soulless corporations. But the internet is making those large, soulless corporations run scared.

Viacom (MTV) is particularly miffed that Generation MTV is fizzling out and almost bought Bebo to try and stay hip (it laucnhed MTV Flux instead). Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace after being slow off the mark to adapt to a new world in love with the internet. Most strangely of all, ITV bought Friends Reunited.

But in terms of news coverage, the emergence of citizen journalism should usher in a new era of free speech in broadcasting. With the advent of vlogging and websites like YouTube, who is to say what is and isn’t broadcasting? It is conceivable that one day soon there will be a blogger or a vlogger who is just as influential as somebody on the television.

For some governments, this means that you should regulate citizen journalists in the same way as you would regulate broadcasters. This year in Singapore the government attempted to gag bloggers during the election campaign. The Indian government also ordered ISPs to block popular blogging sites Blogspot, Typepad and Geocities. Two years ago, French authorities famously arrested a blogger for criticising the city mayor. Does that not all sound like a suppression of free speech?

Citizen journalism has created a new category of person somewhere in between the traditional journalist and the pub ranter. It’s a grey area. We would expect the traditional journalist to adhere to certain standards; we certainly would not expect the pub ranter to. So what should we expect the citizen journalist to do?

People in this arena are becoming increasingly ambitious. There will soon be the launch of a new internet television channel, 18 Doughty Street. Those involved are already among the most successful bloggers around. If 18 Doughty Street succeeds (still a big ‘if’, of course), traditional media companies will have to take notice.

As I said, the reason broadcasters are regulated is because they were in a privileged position. But they are now no longer in such a privileged position. We can get our news from a growing number of different outlets. Today, anybody can write an article or make a film and reach a large audience. There is now genuine competition in the media. There will always be a place for the mainstream media, but they are surely becoming less powerful.

Soon enough Ofcom’s impartiality regulations will look like an anachronism. Soon it should be time to wave goodbye to the impartiality regulations in favour of freedom of speech. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every news outlet would have to become a Fox- or Independent-style ‘views’ outlet. Broadcasters — particularly the BBC — will always want to appear unbiased. There probably isn’t much of an appetite in the UK for a Fox News-style channel — although I can see an opinionated channel based on The Sun being successful.

The point is that we are now lucky enough to be in a position where we have pretty much unlimited access to as many different opinions as we want. So it’s time to celebrate this diversity instead of suppressing it. Murdoch wants to launch a Fox-style channel in the UK? Why not let him? There’ll be thousands of citizen journalists ready to challenge.

It is not unusual for a ‘proper’ journalist to complain about blogging, so I wasn’t going to comment on it. But one of the old cliches that Alibhai-Brown trots out is that blogging is somehow excessively time consuming. The article begins:

Where do blog writers find the time? Do they never go to the theatre, read books, make love?

I might well ask in response, “Where do theatre goers find the time? Do they not have a blog to maintain?” It’s good that Alibhai-Brown thinks we should all be going to the theatre. The thing is, I don’t know anybody who goes to the theatre regularly. That’s mostly because there isn’t a decent theatre anywhere near here, nor can anybody really afford it. Oh, and it’s really time consuming.

You see, everything in the world is time consuming. Cooking and eating a meal takes ages. Going to the gym uses up time. You never hear people saying, “Where do you find the time to go to the gym? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

When they first burst onto the scene, films, television and video games were all criticised for being time-consuming, spoddy pursuits. Some people still say they are, but they are a part of everyday life which many of us cannot imagine living without.

Blogging is the latest in the list. And just like watching films or television or playing games, blogging is an activity that you do in your spare time. It’s not as if I’ve ever said, “Oh no, I can’t go out tonight — I’ve got blogging to do.” People don’t phone into work saying, “Sorry, I can’t come in today; it’s that blog again.”

The only reason I’m writing this post is because I had some spare time. A little gap in my day needed filled. We all come across this from time to time. Some people like to read a book in these situations, which is good. Most people might sit in front of the television. If I wasn’t writing this then I would almost certainly be spending a couple of hours sitting in front of the idiot-box. But I’ve decided to write a post on my blog. Is there something wrong with that?

Of all the things that people find to do in their spare time, blogging is surely one of the most worthwhile. I have learned so much by both reading and writing blogs. For one thing it has opened my mind immensely. You really learn to appreciate other people’s viewpoints. I now have an understanding of opposing viewpoints which I would never have gained if I was just left to read newspapers or watch the television news.

Real, ordinary people expressing real, unfiltered opinions. How can you possibly be against such a thing? In any other sphere such a culture would be celebrated. Did Yasmin Alibhai-Brown criticise, for instance, anti-Iraq war protestors for campaigning or expressing their views? I hardly think so. But because the debate amongst bloggers takes place on computers it simply must be nerdy and time-consuming; a preserve of pale men who never go outdoors and vanity publishers who only blog because they can’t get a proper writing job.

But here is the thing. Why should I trust (or pay to read) what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown or Polly Toynbee or Simon Jenkins or anyone else in the ‘commentariat’ ivory tower has to say? Not when I can read the most diverse range of opinions imaginable from ordinary people who are passionate about their views — all at the click of a mouse and for free.

This is why a lot of journalists — especially op-ed writers and suchlike — often complain about blogging. A lot of nonsense is spoken about ‘citizen journalism’. We need to get real here. Bloggers won’t usurp real journalists or the mainstream media. But bloggers can and do threaten the need for newspapers to have comment pages.

This very article in The Independent said — if I remember correctly (I can’t find out because you have to pay for the priviledge of having information in Indy towers) — that commentators are unsure exactly what qualifies them to be commentators, other than an interest in current affairs. Well look at us bloggers. We’re all interested in current affairs too. And we have the added bonus of not being stuck in an ivory tower. And of being free to read.

Before blogging came along I read the comment pages of newspapers quite often. Now I never do, because I can get all the opinion I want from bloggers. And I have found it to be a far more fulfilling experience than reading the same old tired writers in the dead tree press, whose banal opinions you can usually predict in advance.

Columnists are actually quite dangerous in my view. For some reason politicians are always fair game, but whenever the spotlight is turned onto the professional commentators themselves they throw up their arms in horror and write a kneejerk ill-informed piece criticising blogging.

But why shouldn’t columnists be held to account? In many cases they are just as influential and powerful as politicians. But nobody voted for these commentators. Nobody ever holds them to account, unless it is the odd paragraph here and there in the letters page — which is only included at the whim of an editor anyway. And you seldom see commentators getting properly stuck into a debate.

Even away from those who blog exclusively about current affairs, is there something so wrong about having an outlet to express yourself? To talk about what’s on your mind? An easy way of communicating with people? Having a Sarah blog? Because here is some headline news for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: for a lot of people, blogging is great fun. It is as simple as that.

It should therefore not come as a surprise to anybody that the great unwashed are turning to blogging.

More good posts on Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s column at: Ministry of Truth, Bloggerheads, Not Little England.

It’s about blogging and citizen journalism and that type of thing. Highlights may include me trying and failing to discreetly slurp some coffee before it’s my turn to speak again. Don’t miss it!

The idents are a bit strange. We’re treated to a variety of gormless people goofing about, sometimes in recognisable locations, with a plastic ‘S’ which resembles the old British Steel logo. I think it’s meant to look like they’re all passing the ‘S’ to each other, but the editing is pretty awful so it looks nothing like that. At one point we see a couple of women chatting to each other over a coffee, and this big blue ‘S’ just gets shoved into her hands! Bizarre.

You can see the idents on the video clip attatched to this story on the Scotland Today website. It contains an interview with STV’s big wig Bobby Hain who makes a strange comment about how the two shades of blue in the logo are about people connecting the top to the bottom, or something like that? Where have I seen two shades of blue in a logo before?

The new logo is nothing though. Here is the press release about it.

stv’s new website, stv.tv , will be launched later this summer and will feature an exciting new range of entertainment, lifestyle, news and sports services.

Hang on a minute, stv.tv? Just in case you weren’t aware that STV is a television channel, they have put ‘tv’ in the URL twice. This new website sounds rubbish anyway. There are already a million generic websites claiming to offer an “exciting range of entertainment, lifestyle, news and sports services.” They need to get with the times. Don’t they realise that the coolest thing for broadcasters to do these days is to buy social network websites? They can’t all have been taken already?!

There will also be an exciting new gaming section designed to satisfy Scotland’s evergreen love of bingo and quiz-show based games.

Translation: $$$!

This bit is interesting though.

Some of the first services available in the coming months on stv.tv will include a minute-by-minute comprehensive news service which will be boosted by users posting their own stories, sound bites and video clips…

So is this STV getting into citizen journalism? It could be interesting… But then again, it could just be a bunch of illiterate neds yapping about fitbaw.

The biggest question, though, is what does the ‘S’ stand for? Surely the answer is obvious: Scottish, surely? Well I heard that STV are eager to downplay the idea that the ‘S’ stands for Scottish or Scotland in case it alienates people in the Grampian region! So apparently the ‘S’ can mean anything you want. That’s what S-Club always used to say, so I assumed it just stood for ‘shite’…

• Topic at TV Forum

Guardian Unlimited’s new blog, Comment is free, seems to have opened a bit of a can of worms, and once again bloggers are wondering what the hell a blog actually is.

As a starting point, here is an interesting discussion at Europhobia about it all. There are lots of interesting points there.

There have always been those who maintain that the ‘mainstream media’ simply can’t blog; that it goes against the whole idea of blogging, which is to give the little guys a voice. Nosemonkey says that Glenn Reynolds is not a “proper” blogger, even though he made his name by blogging!

Reynolds, as far as I’m aware, makes a packet out of Instapundit. In my eyes, that makes him a good businessman using the blog format as a means of delivering his product, not a blogger.

This reminds me a lot of the recent minor hoo-ha when Ricky Gervais decided to start charging for his massively popular podcast.

“They have not clue on the subject of podcasting. It’s supposed to be FREE. It’s supposed to rival radio. The Idiots. Rick, steve, karl, if your reading this, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE AELIENATED YOURSELFS FROM THE PODCASTING COMMUNITY!!!!’”

(I don’t mean to compare intelligence or writing standards here. Of course, Nosemonkey is much more thoughtful.) I guess you could ask whether Ricky Gervais was even part of the ‘podcasting community’ in the first place, given that he’s not a ‘little guy’.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn. There is the blog (or podcast) format. They are formats in the same way a newspaper or a radio programme is. The difference between the latter two and the former is that it is much easier for a ‘little guy’ to have a blog than it is for him to have a radio programme. But does that mean that ‘big guys’ should be excluded from blogging? I don’t think so.

I broadly welcome MSM attempts to step into the ‘blogosphere’. Of course, if they do it badly, as many do, they risk being ridiculed and, indeed, alienated from the community (I want to stress community; more on that in a minute). But if a ‘big guy’ does blogging well, it can have many advantages. Isn’t that why Tim Ireland tries to get MPs blogging? What is so inherently wrong with a ‘big guy’ blogging? Why should we scare people off just because they’re a ‘big guy’? Isn’t the conversation to be welcomed?

I also don’t like the idea of excluding people from the ‘proper blogging’ club just because they make money out of blogging. What about people like Jason Kottke? Boing Boing looks like it makes a packet, and while it may not have the same approach as a ‘little guy’ personal blogger, I think it adds a lot to the blogosphere. If I was asked to write an article for a newspaper I would do it (infact, I have done it, but it wasn’t published — the bastards!). And I tell you, if I could make money out of blogging, I certainly wouldn’t say no, and you probably wouldn’t either.

I do like some MSM blogs. Not very much, but I do like them. I guess it’s true that if you wanted to read an MSM viewpoint you would just read the normal website. But I like the conversation aspect of the blogs and the MSM can sometimes pull this off. For instance, I think the BBC were very brave to take such a liberal approach to comments on Nick Robinson’s blog.

And this is perhaps the issue with Comment is Free. In the comments of my previous post about Comment is Free, Simstim put his finger right on it.

I’ve yet to see an article author get down and dirty in the comments and there’s a distinct lack of linking going on in the articles as well as in the comments.

The problem with Comment is Free is that it does feel a little bit like The Guardian are hopping on the bandwaggon a bit. It could be a genuine attempt to have a conversation with its readers, but as things stand it’s just the same old commentators with a little comments form at the bottom. A-woo-hoo! (Having said that, it is early days for Comment is Free, and there does seem to be a reasonable amount of discussion in general.)

That brings us onto the community element I mentioned earlier. Above, I metioned the need to distinguish the blog format from ‘little guy’ bloggers. To me, comments are one of the major features of the blog format. But there we get ourselves into such trouble. Blogs generally involve a list of posts displayed in (reverse) chronological order, but this doesn’t differ much from a CMS like that used by, for instance, At Ease, which I wouldn’t call a blog. I have heard some say that RSS feeds are a distinguishing feature of blogs, but that is nonsense because loads of sites, not just blogs, use RSS feeds.

So that, I think, leaves us with one thing to point the finger at: comments. Still no go I’m afraid. Bloggers that do not have a comments facility may be criticised for not allowing discussions on their patch, but is Normblog not a blog? (Norman Geras, being an academic, probably counts as a ‘big guy’ as well — the horror!) Bloggerheads, if my memory serves me well, was quite late in getting a comments facility, but it definitely always was a blog. Infact, Tim Ireland is practically a cheerleader for the whole idea of blogging. Geras and Ireland have always generally been involved in discussions, so what’s the big fuss?

It’s easy to get bogged down in these issues, but it is really an irrelevance. While we may all have our own ideas whenever we visit a website, there is no hard-and-fast formula that makes website x a blog and website y not a blog. But why bother? If somebody is trying to reach out and attempting to have a conversation, it doesn’t matter whether they are doing it on a blog, a plain old website or with smoke signals.

Something else to consider is whether or not bloggers are in a bit of an ivory tower just like the MSM? I don’t mean that bloggers are part of some kind of privileged elite, although I think a lot of the most popular bloggers out there may well have made a name for themselves whether blogging had been invented or not. This is simply because many of them are such great writers and activists, and it’s just that for us, sitting here in the early 21^st century, blogging is the most convenient and efficient way to get your message out.

But I don’t just mean that; I mean that bloggers may be out of touch with the public as a whole. I think because of the nature of blogging — having debates and arguments and so on — you have to be a clear thinker and a good writer in order to be noticed. Bad writers are ignored, and they eventually get bored of being sidelined and disappear. It’s like a survival of the fittest.

But we should also be wary of the idea that there is one massive ‘blogosphere’. Rather, there are several mini-blogospheres. I and others in this mini-blogosphere know of blogs like Europhobia, Chicken Yoghurt and Tim Worstall. But in a parallel mini-blogosphere, doctorgee who writes about train sets will have his own different big-name train set bloggers to look up to. JonnyB was right when he wrote on Comment is Free:

British bloggers write about their cats. And their favourite bands. And the bloke they shagged last night who they’re not really sure about but are secretly desperate to get a call from. And the bad meal that they had in the restaurant down the road. And the horror of supporting Charlton FC. And finding their drunk neighbour crawling around on their roof.

Some of them write about politics and economics and technical IT stuff. I know these get a lot of publicity, being the kind of things that people who write newspapers are interested in, but you really do have to get out to the world at large a bit more.

Being an MSM site, Comment is Free is attracting its fair share of participants who are not part of the ‘blogosphere’. Some are downright offensive about it. I read an article on The Scotsman website about whether or not some regular feature or other should be turned into a blog or a BBC-style ‘have your say’ section. The published responses suggested a collective, resounding no. Ironically, they were having their say. Don’t they see the irony? Ho-hum.

Despite giving the benefit of the doubt to MSM blogs, the main reason I read blogs is because I want to hear opinions and discussion from normal people, little guys. Some people may dislike this. Here’s one from Comment is Free by chpm:

Personally I find blogs to be just more vanity e-publishing. They can be amusing for a bit but I would rather read a well written article in the Guardian or Spectator that presents a coherent set of ideas marshalled into a cogent piece with wit, a beginning, middle and end.

And a rather more direct one posted at Robert Sharp’s blog:

You sad ****. Why don’t bloggers get a fucking live and walk out into the sunshine once in a while? You will never, ever matter one billionth as much as even the least-read newspaper, magazine or least viewed tv programme.

Leaving an angry comment on a blog is a strange way of showing how little blogs matter. Never mind though. I don’t understand what some people find so offensive about the idea of people expressing themselves or having a discussion. And I’ve never really bought the vanity publishing idea. Maybe it’s true up to a point, but there are far easier ways to be vain. Have they never seen MySpace?!

I do think that sometimes there is an awful lot of hyperbole about the potential of blogs though. There is the question of whether or not bloggers can make a difference in the long run. It’s usually framed around the idea that bloggers should somehow be claiming scalps left, right and centre. I’ve made my views on that clear a few times (in short: I don’t care). It is a slightly annoying aspect of the whole debate about blogging.

Tied in with this is the idea of citizen journalism. It would be a bare-faced lie to say that all bloggers are citizen journalists. I’ve never gone out and investigated anything in my life! Nevertheless, citizen journalists do exist. Some think that this means that bloggers are replacing newspapers. This is just nonsense.

The fact is that there is a two-way relationship between the MSM and bloggers. It is the relationship that is important, not whether or not bloggers are usurping the MSM. We see this relationship in the way that some newspapers are reaching out to bloggers, for instance with The Guardian regularly publishing a selection of thoughts from the blogosphere. There are also the instances when BBC News or Sky News ask viewers to send in photographs and videos of a big news event — we saw this with the London bombings. Bloggers may rely on the MSM for its stories. But by the same token, the MSM is increasingly relying on ‘little people’ for its stories.

Today Oliver Kamm wrote about blogging and how superior the MSM is (now that he is part of the MSM, of course). Longrider sums it up for me:

While it’s true that comment on blogs is driven by stories found in the mainstream media; as, indeed, this is; it provides a platform for two way comment that a newspaper lacks…

The advantage of blogging is that it enables people who would not normally gather together to meet virtually and exchange ideas and if necessary, tactics. Liberty Central is embryonic, but stems from this idea. Whether it will change the face of British politics is moot…

For me, just the fact that blogging gives people — any people — a corner on the internet where they can communicate with each other and express their views is enough for it to be a great thing. Sometimes I think it’s absurd that the views of somebody like me — a fairly mundane 19-year-old, generally lacking in life experience — should have any kind of importance whatsoever. But on the other hand, why shouldn’t I have a voice? The complete ordinariness of me surely makes me all the more qualified to have my say?

Along with wikis, it’s the realisation of the idea of the read / write web. Last year Mark Lawson sneered about blogging to Tim Berners-Lee, who replied that it was almost exactly what he had in mind when he invented the world wide web!

In short, this is my bit of the web, so why shouldn’t I have it? That’s why I’m constantly tinkering with the design and format of this blog — because it’s my little patch and I want to experiment on it and so on and so forth. Hence the recent botched attempt to shove everything I’ve ever written into six categories. (I ditched that idea because it almost made it look like I was saying I was an expert in those subjects, which I’m not at all.) And so on.

I’m not sure which ‘mini-blogosphere’ I fit into (although I probably read and engage with politics blogs the most). I don’t know why people visit this blog. And my visitor figures aren’t astronomically high, I will never have the influence of newspapers, and therefore I probably won’t make much of a difference to the world by having a blog. But as far as I’m concerned, all of that doesn’t matter. Bloggers are merely expressing themselves — and what is wrong with that?

What I can say with certainty is that reading other people’s blogs has opened — and sharpened — my mind tremendously. This window into other people’s lives — reading about their opinions and the oddities in their lives and hearing them explain them — has educated me a lot, and I am grateful to all the bloggers who let me do that. It might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I think it’s great.

What is my overall point then? I think that we should all stop fussing over what is or is not a blog. Whether a blog has a comments facility or not; whether the viewpoints come from ‘mainstream’ ‘big guys’ or ‘little guys’ (maybe this is something I should have followed before I started writing this dinosaur of a post!) — we should just sit back and enjoy the discussion. Because that’s what it’s all about, right?

I updated this post (tidying up and expanding arguments) on 19/03/2006.