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.

I said that I had hoped to tweet a bit from Scotweb2. I am terrible at multitasking though so I only managed a miserly two, hurriedly posted during lunch. So instead I will write a report of what went on.

First off there was a great talk by James Munro who works on an interesting website, Patient Opinion. The site offers people a platform to make comments — positive or negative — about their experiences of the NHS.

It’s a great website demonstrating the idea that perhaps governments should not be making websites — they should be publishing data and APIs for other people to build upon. This is very much in the Mysociety mould. You might expect this sort of website to be provided by the government. Indeed, since Patient Opinion was founded the NHS has started a similar project on its NHS Choices site. Cleverly, Patient Opinion has created a mashup of their content at the NHS’s.

But there are potential problems with such a site receiving government backing. During the presentation it was pointed out by some that on an NHS-run or government-backed website, people might be tempted to rant or let off steam. But in the more neutral arena of an independent site like Patient Opinion, people are more likely to post more thoughtful comments.

Another point about Patient Opinion is that all of the comments that appear there are pre-moderated. If I remember correctly, James Munro said that 95% of all comments are approved on Patient Opinion while only around 75% of comments are approved on NHS Choices. There might be a suspicion that the NHS may suppress negative comments. People are more likely to trust an independent website.

It struck me afterwards (long after there was the opportunity to mention it) that this phenomenon could apply not just to government websites but to all websites. I have written about the poor standard of comments on mainstream media websites a number of times in the past. I have argued that newspaper websites might be better off putting some kind of Technorati-style widget at the bottom of each article rather than appending a comment thread where the poor standard of debate can sometimes be quite off-putting.

Then there are the implications for business websites. It was noted that web 2.0 is all about transparency. Another theme of Scotweb2 was the implications / challenges / opportunities of web 2.0 for small businesses (and, indeed, large businesses). What if a business decides to have a feedback section on its website? It will face the same issues that a government website will face — users will be reluctant to trust it and may be tempted to simply let off steam.

Perhaps the concept of Patient Opinion could be applied to all kinds of different areas. It seems to me that if it works in the realm of healthcare, there is no reason why it wouldn’t make sense in other areas like the voluntary / third sector, pressure groups, the media or even business?

Following James Munro, Simon Dickson made an engaging presentation evangelising about the potential of open source solutions such as Linux, PHP and particularly WordPress. I think I had read this on Simon Dickson’s blog before, but the cost of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website still has your jaw hitting the floor. £19.2m over five years — for one website. And that was it on target. Millions sunk before a single page is made, including £1.47m on the content management system alone.

Simon Dickson’s point is that you don’t need to use proprietary systems built by the likes of Microsoft. Why spend millions on a CMS when you can use the highly flexible WordPress platform which is free? The new-ish 10 Downing Street website is run on WordPress. And the Wales Office website is also now run on WordPress, and it cost a significantly lower amount of money. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was, but it was certainly not £19.2m.

Something that came up a number of times was that the cause of many of the problems leading to inadequate or ridiculously expensive government websites is to do with mindset. WordPress is seen as a risk; Microsoft is a trusted brand. Thankfully that seems to be changing in a lot of areas.

I got the sense that a lot of people were very impressed by the idea of WordPress. If you’ve been using it for a while it is easy to take it for granted. But the fact remains that it is a remarkable achievement for a community to have created such a powerful open-source, freely available and fully tweakable application.

After Simon Dickson’s initial presentation, we split up into two groups. Already being a convert to WordPress, I opted to skip Simon Dickson’s workshop about WordPress and instead I stuck around for Stewart Kirkpatrick’s talk about content. The presentation basically highlighted interesting websites that have become successful because of the careful choice of content. For instance, YouTube beat Google Video because it gives you plenty of toys to play with (e.g. it’s dead easy to share videos on Facebook, embed them on your blog, etc) and relevant videos to tempt you further. Common sense stuff really.

I think it was at this point of the afternoon that we got talking about some startling instances of data unavailability. Apparently the Royal Mail doesn’t have a database of locations of all of its postboxes, while another person said he knew of a company that couldn’t even produce a database of its employees. if I recall correctly, James Munro mentioned the difficulty Patient Opinion had in simply getting a database of Scottish hospitals and their postcodes.

After lunch there was a talk about BT Tradespace. Then I hung around for Mark Ballard’s workshop about web 2.0 and civic society. The thing that struck me most during this discussion was the idea that some voluntary organisations are seemingly quite worried about web 2.0 efforts swiping the rug from under their feet.

All the while I had a good chit-chat with Stephen Glenn. I would have loved to have been able to join the others in the pub, but unfortunately I had to rush back home to work.

All-in-all it was a great day with many fascinating presentations. Hats off to Alex Stobart for organising the event. By the sounds of it there are going to be more events like this in the future. It would be great for the web 2.0 ball to get rolling a bit faster in Scotland.

There’s been a lot of chat recently about whether blogging is dead, sparked by this article in Wired by Paul Boutin. It’s easy to scoff at the article, and the idea that blogging is dead is obviously nonsense. But I doubt the claim would have got so much attention if there wasn’t a bit of truth in it.

I’m not sure that much of what Paul Boutin says is new though. The first time I heard about the article was through Mike Power who added:

…most people under 20 wouldn’t touch blogging with a barge pole, seeing it as old-fashioned and nerdy.

That’s an interesting point. A lot of outsiders tend to think of blogging and the like as something that young people do. But I remember a few years ago a survey finding that the average age of readers of political blogs in the UK is around 40. That might be younger than, say, the average age of readers of The Telegraph, but we’re not talking about the cast of Skins here.

Before that, I always wondered why there weren’t more people my age blogging. I started blogging six years ago when I was 16, but I am an outlier. I can’t think of anyone else who has been blogging for that long from such a young age (though no doubt there are some). I struggle even to think of many bloggers who are my age or younger full stop. There are a few that I know of, but I could probably count them on one hand.

This links neatly in with one of Paul Boutin’s points though. Blogging is being overtaken by social networking sites like Facebook. It’s worth remembering why I started blogging. It is simple: I was bored. My first post was written on a cold, boring night in the middle of the Christmas school holiday.

Moreover, if I had an aim with my blog, it was as a really easy way to reach a wide variety of friends in a really efficient way. At first I was peeved when I realised that my friends couldn’t be bothered reading my blog. What I had forgotten was that, while updating a blog was efficient for me, it was wildly inefficient to get all of my friends to keep on visiting my blog all the time.

Social networking sites fix that problem by giving everyone a central space to share their thoughts and news. No doubt if sites like Bebo and Facebook were around back then, I wouldn’t have started a blog. Indeed, I originally wanted to set up a LiveJournal rather than a blog, but back then you had to pay for a LiveJournal account, so I set up with Blogger instead.

The only reason I stuck with blogging was through the quite accidental discovery that, while my friends were seemingly uninterested in what I had to say, complete strangers would regularly visit to see what I was thinking. That amazing fact is what keeps me going as a blogger, despite some pretty dry patches over the years.

And I’m lucky to have discovered that. Blogging has given me plenty of opportunities that I would never have had were I a simple Facebook user. Undoubtedly my life has been enriched by blogging as it has furnished me with an armful of skills. A 16-year-old Duncan Stephen today would almost certainly not start blogging — but he’d be worse off for it.

But it is important for blogging that the landscape has changed over the past few years. Before 2004, the buzzword was blogging, pretty much exclusively so. Today you can add podcasts, social networks, Flickr, YouTube, wikis, microblogging, social bookmarking, tumblelogging and an increasing list of tools that are all lumped together under the “web 2.0″ umbrella. And when the landscape changes, blogging will inevitably have to evolve. As Rory Cellan Jones says, “its nature is changing.”

The evolution of blogging is nothing new though. By most accounts, blogging is now over ten years old, easily out-dating the web 2.0 phenomenon. The man who is said to have coined the word weblog, Jorn Barger, intended it to mean “logging the web”. That makes tumblelogging or linklogging services such as Delicious a much closer relative to the earliest blogs than what are today known as blogs.

Similarly, during a middle period beginning at the start of this decade, blogging was taken broadly to mean an online journal or a diary, often with very personal posts. Today, that would be seen as quite odd, since social networking sites such as Facebook are a much more appropriate, private place to talk about your personal life. It might seem inappropriate that people blogged so much about personal issues, but prior to the likes of Facebook, people had no choice.

Meanwhile, the stereotypical blogger writing about what he had for breakfast has now moved wholesale over to Twitter, a more relaxed place where there is no stigma to writing banal, inconsequential nonsense. Mind you, the advent of Qwitter may change that!

Over the years, my blog has evolved from being somewhere where I would (quite inadvisedly, and sometimes shamefully) leave personal rants, or write about what I had for breakfast, to a place where I would take part in conversations about current issues. Instead of writing a few short and snappy posts per day, this blog now more-or-less exclusively contains posts around 1,000+ words long typically published several days apart. Whereas a few years ago I may have written a stream of consciousness, today I might spend a few days (or even a few months!) mulling over a subject before writing it down. Places like Flickr and Twitter certainly wouldn’t allow me to do that, as Paul Stamatiou points out.

Instead of being a one-stop-shop for all things me, my blog is now just one part of a huge range of online activities. How all of these activities relate to each other and what I should publicise where is a problem that I still grapple with, and I probably won’t stop grappling with it any time soon. (I’ve currently settled on gathering everything in a ’sidebar’ on the home page.)

A lot of blogs have undergone a similar transformation over the years. It’s notable how many people are now relatively quiet on their blogs, but are still updating Twitter regularly. As if to illustrate that, an item on the Today programme this morning was meant to discuss the death of blogging but ended up dwelling more on the popularity of Twitter.

But saying today that this shift to other services like Twitter is a sign that blogging is dead is just as daft as saying in 2004 that blogging threatened the death of the mainstream media. It would be deeply ironic if the once vibrant and hip blogging scene were to itself become threatened by new technology. But it won’t. The world evolves and blogging simply has to evolve with it, just as the mainstream media evolved with the advent of blogging. Rather than dying, blogging is maturing, as Gary Andrews notes.

I think Paul Boutin makes some really good points, but he misses the point a few times. Trolls and flamers in comments are a well-known problem. But let’s face it, that is hardly confined to blogging. That is a problem with the internet in general.

Meanwhile, the point about most bloggers being unable to compete with the top 100 is nothing short of bizarre. How many people really start blogging with the intention of being in the top 100? Though being in the top 100 would be nice, it is far from my primary motivation. Has Paul Boutain never heard of the long tail? As John Connell notes, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, is the father of the long tail. All-in-all, it’s just a really odd argument to be put forward in such an arena.

And the idea that Google doesn’t notice blogs any more is absolutely bizarre. This certainly does not chime with my experiences. Over three quarters of my visitors come from search engines. That figure used to be closer to two thirds. My friends often tell me that they accidentally found my blog when they were searching for something (that’s the only way I can get them to read my blog to this day!). I myself have, to my annoyance, had my blog come up as a high result in a search.

Then there is the idea that blogs need to be personal to be valuable to people. I hardly think this is so. In fact, this is a complete contradiction to Paul Boutin’s assertion that bloggers all aspire to be the next Huffington Post or Treehugger, not exactly the most personal sites in the world. As Robin Hamman says, Twitter and Facebook may lead to the decline of the diarist blogger, but the topical blogger remains unaffected.

Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, there might be easier — and more personal — ways to publish your content than to start a blog. And there is absolutely no doubt that maintaining a blog is a major commitment. But that doesn’t mean that blogging doesn’t have an important role to play. In fact, I would argue that it makes blogging all the more important.

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?

Ideas of Civilisation has written a really interesting post about the state of the Scottish blogosphere compared with the dodgy comments that get posted on The Herald’s website, Scotsman.com and the like.

The Scottish blogosphere is indeed, by and large, a pretty good place for a debate. Nowadays it is probably dominated a bit too much by SNP supporters, but I think the debate is usually pretty respectful. IoC asks, why does this respectful atmosphere not cross over into the mainstream media comment sites?

The answer is that they are mainstream media comment sites. As I have pointed out before, trolls, flamers and knuckle-draggers are attracted to MSM comment sites like flies on a shit. The blog spEak You’re bRanes, a blog I mention many times, does a good job of compiling the most ridiculous comments posted to MSM outlets.

The thing is that IoC is right when he says that the debate in the Scottish blogosphere is good. But this isn’t peculiar to Scotland. The debate in the blogosphere world-wide is also good. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of extreme comments in MSM websites does not just exist on Scottish websites (although Scotland does have a distinct phenomenon with its ‘cybernats’). It is known to media outlets the world over, and even some big websites such as Digg and YouTube.

So why is there such a difference? After all, the point of blogging is meant to be that it’s really easy to get involved in. So why don’t people with poisonous views pollute the blogosphere so easily?

The answer is that it’s so simple to avoid poisonous people in the blogosphere. Does someone have a terrible blog? That’s okay, because no-one will read it. Knuckle-dragging extremists find that they will reach a far wider audience if they post on a website like Scotsman.com or the BBC.

There is another answer. Even though in theory it is easy to set up a blog, the reality is slightly different. You still have to put in quite a lot of effort. It can be time-consuming and you have to come up with the goods to make sure people read it. If you are not interested in having a genuine discussion, you will soon find that blogging is quite costly. But for those who are willing to put the effort in for there to be a good debate, the pay-off can be good. For this reason, bloggers tend to be more articulate, reasoned and intelligent than your average Have Your Sayer.

Does this mean that we should give up on the idea of having comments on the BBC’s blogs or The Herald’s political stories? Far from it. All you have to do to improve the nature of the debate is create the right mechanism to ensure that the cream will rise up.

Websites such as Digg and YouTube have implemented a voting mechanism in an attempt to get rid of trolls. You can choose to give a comment a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. The BBC’s Have Your Say has a similar voting mechanism. However, this doesn’t work in my view. In fact, if anything, it exacerbates the problem. It just makes the comments section even more of a hotbed of demagoguery — the loudest attention seekers, not the most reasoned and articulate, will grab the most votes.

Some websites are just lucky enough to have a good audience that respects debate. The Economist’s website is said to be relatively free of HYS-style trolls. That is probably due to the target audience of the publication. I suspect many HYSers aren’t even aware of the existence of The Economist and if they are, they aren’t interested in posting there because it’s not a publication for them.

However, for the more mass-market audiences of the likes of the BBC, The Herald and The Scotsman, it’s too late to do anything about this. They made a decision long ago to appeal to the masses, so its audience will have that demagogic element that will be reflected in the comments.

Another alternative might be to force users to post under their real names. It is generally believed that once people’s cloak of anonymity has been removed, their online debating style becomes more respectful and considered.

On the other hand, many bloggers and commenters have genuine reason to wish to remain anonymous. And, barring the universal adoption of an OpenID-style system, it would be nigh on impossible to police. A decent ‘middle ground’ option might be to place OpenID comments at the top of the thread and hide the anonymous comments towards the bottom of the page.

Another possible solution is simply to make it costly for the ill-informed jokers to take part. For some, it may be an anathema to make people pay to post comments — almost against the culture of the web. But it needn’t be.

There is one big website that is known for having decent comments sections that avoid the numbskullery of sites such as YouTube — MetaFilter. There it costs $5 to post comments. That is a one-time life-long fee. Pay $5 and you can post to your heart’s content. There is also a one-week time lag between signing up and being able to post.

This ensures that only the people who are interested in contributing properly get involved. $5 is quite a small fee for those who really value MetaFilter, but it is enough to deter time-wasting trolls. A one-week time lag also prevents people from just posting a crazy extreme rant in the heat of the moment. Just like blogging, MetaFilter is costly for the time-wasters, but beneficial for those who want to make a genuine contribution.

The solution for the MSM websites if they want to clean out their comment sections is therefore to somehow create a mechanism that makes it costly for extremist ranters to post, but makes it beneficial for those who want to take part in a reasoned debate.

Perhaps a MeFi-style one-off fee or a time lag might do the trick. If you had to pay, say, £5 to open a lifetime account on Scotsman.com to allow you to post, you might just go for it if that £5 was enough to deter the ranting trolls. It could also be a handy (though potentially small) additional source of income for the media outlets.

IoC’s issue isn’t just with the media websites though. It’s also with the Scottish Government’s website. If a government website becomes an outlet for extreme views, that is undoubtedly a problem. The Scottish Government’s “National Conversation” has been accused of being “a chatroom for cybernats“. That was probably always inevitable. After all, a “conversation” about independence initiated by the SNP is bound not to last long or be very meaningful.

Nonetheless, I have to applaud the Scottish Government for going ahead with the project. To have user-generated content on a government website is pretty big stuff if you ask me and it’s probably the right thing to do — engaging the citizens in the policy-making process and all that.

But the contributions have to be meaningful. I’ve not been following the National Conversation very closely. Skimming through it just now, it doesn’t look too bad, but obviously it’s caused concern among some.

Perhaps for user-generated content on government websites there should be an expectation that you do not contribute anonymously. I think that is probably a reasonable expectation for someone who wants to take part in civic society. People who write a letter to their MP or MSP or another figure in public office can’t expect a reply without supplying a name and address. The Government’s e-petition website also requires you to enter a name and address. The authenticity of some of these names is questionable though.

Perhaps future projects like the National Conversation might require people to supply real names and addresses (not publicly viewable of course) in order to participate. This would remove the cloak of anonymity and improve the likelihood of there being a sensible debate. Looking at the National Conversation website, it looks like most (but not all) participants are contributing under their real names anyway. Still, it’s a thought.