Iain Macwhirter's critique of blogging

A series of posts

1. Iain Macwhirter inadvertently criticised the media
2. Iain Macwhirter and the relationship between the media and bloggers

Part one of this article was published yesterday

Further evidence that Iain Macwhirter is struggling to see beyond the model of the media comes from the fact that the blogs he cites as “very good and intelligent” are both offerings from the media. Paul Krugman’s blog is funded by the New York Times while Robert Peston’s is run by the BBC.

Interestingly, the one he criticises — aside from Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes — is by established journalist Alex Massie, whose blog is hosted by The Spectator. (Incidentally, Alex Massie’s evisceration of Iain Macwhirter’s original article is well worth a read.) There is still no sign that Mr Macwhirter will deign to read the output of someone who isn’t sharing his ivory tower.

He also makes the point about bloggers being geeks, citing the fact that a lot of it relies on the dark art of SEO. He says that “there is a science to blogging”. This may be so, certainly for the larger blogs out there. But let’s be clear about this — you don’t need to know SEO to blog. You just have to write. The barriers to entry are incredibly low. I started blogging when I was at school and it was years before I even learnt what SEO was, never mind begin to implement the techniques. It didn’t stop me from blogging. You can learn as you go along. Or you can choose not to, if you wish.

Whatever, it is a hell of a lot more accessible than the media. How do I go about getting a column in a newspaper? The short answer is that I can’t. Want to be a blogger? Sign up to WordPress.com or Blogger and you’ve already made it.

Where Iain Macwhirter is probably closest to being right is in his point about personal attacks on the blogosphere. It is true that there is rather too much of this. But it usually comes from the same four or five bloggers, and I don’t read any of them.

Sometimes people (including, I confess, me) bemoan the fact that there is still no Scottish Guido Fawkes. But in a way we should be relieved that this brash and divisive model is not replicated in the Scottish political scene.

The Scottish blogosphere is actually a fairly pleasant place, as has been noted by IoC. Will Patterson, in his letter to The Herald, pointed out that you can read about the great blogging that goes on every week on Scottish Roundup.

I like to think that the Roundup has helped foster a friendly atmosphere in the Scottish blogosphere. We do, of course, have our differences. But that is what you expect in a debate. By and large, we are a respectful and friendly bunch. Despite our political differences, I think there is a clear Scottish political blogging community. A fair bunch of us will be attending a meet-up later today. And it always amazes me that even those with the strongest political views can put their differences aside and give rival viewpoints a fair airing when they are invited to edit the Scottish Roundup. Stephen Glenn is a typical example of this.

There is, of course, the phenomenon of the Cybernats, which is a problem. But it’s not a problem with blogging. The truly swivel-eyed will never find a decent platform for themselves on the blogosphere. That is because it is too easy to ignore a bad blogger — you simply don’t read the blog.

Where Cybernattery is a problem is in comments. As I have pointed out a number of times before, the nature of comments is very different to the nature of blogging. I suspect Iain Macwhirter’s impression of blogging comes mainly from the comments to his own pieces, which is a shame because they are no doubt awful. He says, “This has now become institutionalised in the form of the blog, which is an extension of this kind of citizen journalism.” But it is a major mistake to assume that bloggers and commenters are the same people, or even vaguely close relatives.

As Macwhirter himself points out, bloggers want to be read. But as I have noted, it is easy to ignore a blogger by simply not reading. So the truly awful commenters would never succeed as bloggers because they simply will not get read and won’t make any impact.

That is precisely why websites like The Herald, Scotsman.com, Comment is free, the BBC’s Have Your Say, Digg and YouTube suffer from having terrible comments. Because these are huge websites, commenters know they are guaranteed an audience. Unlike a blogger, they don’t have to build an audience by producing quality content. They already have the spotlight they crave so that they can spout out their nonsense. Bloggers produce a higher-quality product because they need to come up with the goods or people will not read. Commenters believe they will have people reading anyway.

That is not, of course, a criticism of all comments. Small and medium-sized blogs generally have great comment sections, and I am lucky to be able to count this blog among the medium-sized blogs that generally have thriving and friendly comments sections. It is the big media sites that attract bad commenters like files on a poop.

To tie all the loose ends together, the point — as everyone agrees — is that the media landscape is changing. Kezia Dugdale has a good overview of what’s going on.

A recent piece in the Sunday Herald suggested that my blogs get the sort of readership that a local newspaper can expect. That was news to me, and it rather sums up just how different the world of the media is becoming. While the blogosphere grows and grows, the likes of The Scotsman and The Herald are struggling to scrape together enough coppers to fund next week’s editions.

This makes the way the media approaches the web all-important. Johnston Press’s decision to rip the perfectly adequate Scotsman.com to shreds and implement their own shaky template has effectively put a nail in their own coffin. Traffic has halved since they took over. The Herald’s web presence has always been dire, and signs for the future are not good.

Given this state of affairs, the relationship between blogging and the media will become ever-more important. Everyone in this arena is still feeling their way around in an uncertain new world, and everyone will make mistakes along the way. The media could be helped significantly if their most high-profile commentators had a modicum of awareness of what the real strengths of blogging actually are.

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?

One of the biggest problems is that there are just so many of them. The ones I always saw as the most important were the Bloggies — but perhaps that is just because they are the ones I came across first. Besides, I’ve never been nominated for them, so I hate them.

It’s a bit like degrees, as we have been discussing a few posts back. There are so many blogging awards that most of them mean zilch. So it’s quite funny to see Neil Clark acting as though he is some kind of cyber-god for winning a particularly flawed poll.

The full details are over at The Wardman Wire. Because you could vote multiple times (once a day, apparently), Neil Clark encouraged his readers to vote multiple times. Nineteen times in five days, to be exact.

Then when he won he went over to his patch on Comment is free and declared a blogging revolution — hilariously — “because my views are more in tune with ordinary people than most in the blogosphere”!

The only time I had previously come across Neil Clark before was when he wrote a particularly odious piece on Comment is free about the campaign to grant asylum to Iraqi employees for British forces. It rightly drew widespread condemnation from bloggers across the spectrum. (More on the Iraqi employees campaign here.)

However, this is perfectly in tune with his views on foreigners in general, so it seems. Mr Eugenides has pointed out that (as well as being a defender of Slobodan Milošević) Neil Clark is a candidate for the British People’s Alliance, which has among its policies the following:

The British People’s Alliance is also determined to expose, to halt, and to reverse the deliberate importation of a new working class whose members understand no English except commands, know nothing about workers’ rights in this country, can be deported if they step out of line, and (since they have no affinity with any particular part of this country) can be moved around at will, so that the old working class can be told to go hang, taking with it its unions, its minimum wage, its health and safety regulations, and so forth.

The British People’s Alliance is determined to expose, to halt, and to reverse the enforced bilingualism or multilingualism that transfers economic, social, cultural and political power to a bilingual or multilingual elite, so that those who are or will be excluded are or will be the English-speaking working class, black and white.

This is supposed to be a left-wing party, but it sounds more like the language of the BNP (complete with “some of my best friends are black” statement at the end). But it just goes to show — yet again — that the difference between left and right really is negligible. After all, big government is big government, and once it controls one part of the economy then control of other parts of our lives is not far behind.

Rather than left or right, what really matters is whether you are a liberal or an authoritarian. And ballot stuffer Neil Clark certainly isn’t a liberal.

(I will expand on my views on liberalism and statism in two separate posts soon.)

* I did actually win an award today, and coincidentally it was in a post about Neil Clark.

However, when I thought that, I was forgetting one thing: most people are bloody morons.

And here is the unfortunate thing for the brave MSM outlets that have decided to allow comments of some form on their website. The number of morons as an overall percentage of participants in a comments thread is directly proportional to the popularity of a website (I’ve not done a scientific study on this, you understand. But we all know it’s true).

It is not difficult to understand the reasons why. Nincompoops can’t be bothered to find any smaller sites. And why bother when you have the opportunity to appear on the website of a very big newspaper or broadcaster and expose to the world your shoddily thought out arguments and even worse English.

There is bad news for us bloggers as well though. Because big blogs also have comment threads containing rivers of word-poo, comment spew and general all-out arse drizzle. Just think of the bigger British blogs. Iain Dale? Guido Fawkes? Harry’s Place? You need to put on a hygiene mask before clicking onto the comments sections.

Smaller bloggers like myself have it lucky. We might not have an audience of thousands, but at least generally good comments are posted here. I guess there is probably a “sweet spot” — probably a few hundred unique visitors per day — where the comments sections are generally good (if sometimes a tad on the short side). I am lucky enough to be there at the moment.

James Higham also counts among those lucky medium-sized bloggers. He has brought to my attention this article one The Age‘s website.

Honestly, I’ve had enough.

Enough of the flaming, the trolling, the moderation, the spam, the ‘who’s-got-more’ syndrome, the inanity and the sheer stupidity behind allowing them on sites like theage.com.au.

They devalue our content, insult much of our readership, piss off our advertisers, waste massive amounts of our time and place us at an enormous legal risk.

It is all true. The Guardian‘s Comment is free might be celebrated for… something or other. But it didn’t take long for it to gain a reputation of being a loon magnet.

Scotsman.com is also particularly bad. I often find myself scrolling down to read the comments, but I really don’t know why. They are always utter shit. Reading it is just a form of punishment. Do those people have two brain cells between them all to rub together? Doubtful.

I do often wonder if the high heid yins rather regret ever allowing comments on their website. It is an embarrassment to their newspaper and to the nation (ironic given that most of the commenters are nationalists).

Of course, if they ever took the comments away they would be accused of suppressing free speech and avoiding debate and so on. They are now stuck with the situation, having to persuade their advertisers to be associated with those rivers of comment-shit.

It would not surprise me if the other papers were in the same situation. I’ve had a glance on The Herald‘s website, but I don’t think I have the stomach to look any further. I have learnt about Bentham’s thoughts at university you know.

Of course, the exponent of the “shit comments on an MSM / popular website” phenomenon is the BBC’s Have Your Say section. Oh my goodness. Have Your Say is so bad that it has now has a blog dedicated to ridiculing it day in, day out.

spEak You’re bRanes is written by a brave person who goes through the pain of reading Have Your Say for the benefit of our entertainment. It has unveiled the different classes of commenter, from those with delusions of grandeur to armchair generals to good old racists.

Every person with any power behind the website of a media organisation should read this blog before allowing readers to leave comments to let themselves know what they are in for. It will be like dipping the bottom of every webpage on their site into an unflushed toilet.

Still, they should not be discouraged from allowing some kind of user-generated responses on their website. The problem is very easy to solve. It has been implemented by many newspapers. The answer is at the bottom of this post, just above the comments. And it is at the end of that piece on The Age website: Technorati widgets.

This has several advantages over comment sections. Morons would have to go to the bother of setting up their own blog. Although setting up a blog is dead easy, it requires much more effort than vomming up some words into a box, which is all they currently have to do.

Also, loons would be two clicks away from the bright lights of the popular / MSM website, which will surely take a lot of the incentive away.

And, as The Age‘s James Farmer points out, the conversation would almost certainly be better than what we currently have.

So why not just do it? I can understand that it might be difficult to remove comments sections, due to the risk of being burnt at the stake by all the loons who currently live there. But why can, for instance, the BBC not have a little box of responses via Technorati next to each news story (complete with “The BBC is not responsible for blah blah blah…”, of course)?

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.

I read somewhere that they’ve got over 200 people signed up to be writing for ‘Comment is free’. But why weren’t they blogging in the first place? Couldn’t they just have got George Galloway to write some stuff for Newsblog, or Mark Lawson to write something for Culture Vulture?

There’s been a blaze of hype for ‘Comment is free’, but I don’t even know what it is meant to be. It’s being called a blog. I don’t think I’m the sort of person that goes on about what is and isn’t a blog (although I strongly feel that a comment section is half of what a blog should be all about). And I don’t have a problem with the ‘mainstream media’ climbing aboard the bandwaggon. But it doesn’t feel much like a blog to me.

The design is lovely — in fact, it serves as yet another reminder of just how creaky the old Guardian Unlimited design is these days. But if you’re looking for something a bit bloggy, prepare to be confused. The lion’s share of the screen is given over to ‘Editor’s picks’, which I guess is fair enough. With over 200 writers, it will probably be quite easy to miss notable entries. But at the moment there is a massive illustration in the way. Is it going to be there forever? On my monitor, it takes up about half of the browser window’s height. It pissed me right off the first time I visited.

In the top right-hand corner we’re given links to columns that were written for the dead tree edition. You can’t post comments to them, which makes this part of ‘Comment is free’ little different to the old Comment & Analysis (or whatever they renamed it for the Berliner redesign) section. The ‘blog’ — the chronologically ordered list of posts — is shoehorned into a tiny column on the left. It really does seem like the blog idea has been sidelined.

As for the comments section itself, you have to jump through hoops to register for it — although this seems like an attempt to prevent spam / flaming / shite comments / etc. But why can’t you link back to your own blog? I am struggling to think of any other blog that has a comments facility and doesn’t let you do this, and Guardian Unlimited’s other blogs let you do this. This is a mistake — communication between blogs is part of what makes the ‘blogosphere’ the buzzing thing that it is. At least a link to Technorati results is displayed though, so that is something.

And another thing. Why is Steve Bell’s ‘If…’ in there? What’s that got to do with it? Why isn’t it just in the cartoons section?

I don’t think I get it. The introductory post begins:

Welcome to Comment is free, the first collective comment blog by a British newspaper website.

So Gamesblog, Organ Grinder and all of The Guardian‘s other blogs weren’t ‘collective comment blogs’ (whatever that is)? Apart from the swish design and the dizzying number of writers, I don’t understand what the difference is. And now that we have this massive ‘Comment is free’ überblog, why are all the old blogs continuing?

What I would really like to see is a comments section appended onto every single item published on Guardian Unlimited, although apparently this is only a matter of time. Makes me wonder once again, though, what the big difference about ‘Comment is free’ actually is.

Still, all head-scratching aside, this must be welcomed. The Guardian seems to be making a legitimate attempt at getting its writers to have a proper discussion with its readers. That is a real step forward. Less than year ago Mark Lawson wrote an article deriding blogs. Today he’s writing for one.

So my final verdict? We’ll wait and see, although for now it’s a tentative thumbs-up. I just need to work out what it actually is.