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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see that the Terry Watch blog was the subject of a piece in last week’s Sunday Herald (via Jeff).

I didn’t read Terry Watch. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was still going. I expressed my discomfort about the blog not too long after it started, actually.

I’m not particularly a fan of these negative campaign blogs as a whole. I think inevitably the heat / light ratio increases in such blogs. For that reason I didn’t ever check the blog while I was compiling the Roundups. For the same reasons I also ignore blogs such as Ridiculous Politics and Fib Dems — both blogs which now appear to be defunct. It’s possibly fair to say that Terry Watch too is now defunct.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly a fan of the Terry Watch blog, I can’t agree with Jeff’s assessment that Terry Kelly was the victim of “bullying” here. I haven’t seen the controversial images that were posted by Shotgun (not a blogger I’ve ever been a fan of). From what I have heard though they certainly crossed the line.

But a lot of what I saw on Terry Watch could be bracketed under ‘fair comment’. Some excellent bloggers were involved in the site, some of whom have found their names being dragged through the mud in the comments over at the Sunday Herald website quite unfairly.

Indeed, the whole piece, written by Jasper Hamill, looks like pretty bad journalism to me. Through a sleight-of-hand Hamill attempts to associate the Terry Watch blog with racist hate-mail sent to Terry Kelly. To link the blog to this mail without any evidence is pretty disingenuous, particularly since the anti-Terry Kelly backlash began several months before the Terry Watch blog was set up. I, for instance, wrote about Terry Kelly as early as 2006, and again here. I followed up a couple of months later describing him as The greatest argument against representative democracy — a view I stick to.

If you read the article carefully it is clear that the controversy surrounding the Terry Watch blog was caused by Shotgun. But the story is “sexed up” with liberally-sprinkled references to Right for Scotland, revealing his identity in the process. The reason the story mentions RfS? Because he once stood for the Conservative party. In other words, this story is yet more of the “Booo! Tories!” nonsense that I wrote about last month.

The headline is, “Failed Tory candidate contributed to hate website attacking political rival — ‘TerryWatch’ blog contains uploaded photographs of Labour councillor’s daughter doctored to create obscene images”. A more faithful headline would have read, “Random shock-blogger Shotgun posts offensive images” — but that would have taken the wind right out of the sails of the story.

Plobotsky continued the ‘guilt by association’ theme set by Jasper Hamill, accusing several top Scottish bloggers of being culpable for Shotgun’s images. Obviously, though, they are not culpable for Shotgun’s images. Clairwil has explained why.

I guess the difference between Clairwil et al. and Right for Scotland is that RfS apparently continued to post after Shotgun’s images were published while the others decided to stop contributing. That perhaps demonstrates that RfS has slightly poor judgement, but it hardly shows any malicious intent. I feel sorry for him that his name has been dragged through the mud as a result of gutter journalism. Thankfully a few of the comments provide testimonials outlining RfS’s good character, which I see no reason to doubt.

As for Terry Kelly, I can feel no sympathy for him. As I recall, the original reason why Terry Watch was set up was as a response to Terry Kelly’s thoroughly abusive responses to commenters on his blog. As I said in that post I wrote last year, the Kellys (Terry and Rayleen) have a pretty solid track record of baselessly accusing other bloggers of being mentally ill, racist, homophobic and whatever slurs he can manage to shove into the debate.

Once, instead of engaging in a proper conversation with me, he decided to slur me by saying that I must either be a nationalist or right-wing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think if you have been reading my blog for any length of time you will come to the opposite conclusion. Terry Kelly obviously couldn’t be bothered actually reading my blog and engaging in a sensible debate, so decided to resort to ill-targeted personal attacks.

That wasn’t my final encounter with him though. He went back to Scottish Roundup, calling me “janus faced C - - -”. One can only guess what his four-letter C-word was supposed to be, but at least he had the decency to censor himself on that occasion. Given his track record, one can only assume that he is crying crocodile tears when he complains about the robust nature of Terry Watch in the Sunday Herald piece.

However, despite being at the receiving end of his terrible debating skills, I did not feel the need to take part in the Terry Watch malarkey. I felt that Terry Kelly’s own blog did the job for Terry Watch. You don’t have to spend long reading it to realise that Terry Kelly is an utter buffoon, with badly-thought out opinions and a debating style that borders on the abusive who routinely fails to publish legitimate comments. In short, it sums up everything that is wrong with the anything-as-long-as-it’s-Labour mentality that exists in the west of Scotland.

Did Jasper Hamill’s piece mention just how bad a representative Terry Kelly is? Just this weaselly-worded phrase: “ill-thought out proclamations which, among other things, claimed women were “thick”". Calling women thick is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem with Terry Kelly. Delving into the bizarre views of Terry Kelly and just what accounts for the fact that this man gets elected time after time would have made for a much more worthy story than trying to attach the blame to RfS for something he didn’t do.

As for the suggestion that the Terry Watch blog represented bullying, I would think that this is an overstatement. Bullies are people who pick on the weak and powerless. As a Labour councillor, Terry Kelly is certainly neither weak nor powerless compared to the bloggers he crosses swords with in his own borderline-abusive manner. To call Terry Watch a bullying campaign is surely an injustice to the many people who are the real victims of bullying.

As long as the content is non-abusive, there is a place for a blog like Terry Watch, no matter how negative it is. Terry Kelly is an elected representative and therefore ought to be held to account. And as Clairwil said, I doubt Terry Kelly entered politics without being thick-skinned enough to take robust debate. He certainly knows how to dole it out.

There is a lesson from all of this though. As bloggers, we have a responsibility to ensure that high standards of debate are adhered to. Both Terry Kelly himself and the Terry Watch blog probably failed on this account. Indeed, online debates are well known for descending into flame wars, tirades of abuse and disrespect. How to keep the standards of debate high will be the subject of a future post here.

Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting took the baton from me and listed his top 10 blogs (although unlike me, he concentrated just on Scottish political blogs). In the process, he accused this place of having “a scarcity of posts of late”.

Guilty as charged. A number of elements have conspired against me when it comes to updating this blog.

First of all, I set up a separate F1 blog — immediately robbing this place of around half its content! Then there was the fact that I was in my final year at university. I didn’t want to mess it up as the dissertation deadline passed, then essay deadlines, then the exams came along.

Even since the exams have finished, though, it hasn’t quite worked out. I always find the transition from busy (!) student to lazy summertime bum difficult for some reason that I can’t put my finger on. Blogging always takes a back seat for a week or two as I grab some rest and get those summer jobs dealt with. I have been — gasp — reading books for leisure (which I never get the time to do during term time). I have been listening to that pile of unlistened-to CDs that has built up since last summer. The pile is now down to six which is very exciting. I have also tidied my room from top to bottom, sorting through stuff to work out if I should chuck them out or not.

Then there is the small matter of finding a job. Or, more accurately, working out what my career is going to be. Now that university is over for good (and I doubt I will be darkening the doors of academia again), I can now — belatedly — devote more of my brain power towards researching careers. I have not got very far forward. Every time I seem to get closer to finding a path that I find acceptable, something comes along to put me off. For this and various other reasons, I still find myself running around Edinburgh from time to time.

Also, for the past seven or eight months I have routinely been taking daily walks round the park and suchlike. This was partly to get me out of the house and into the sun. It is also with one eye on my slowly-but-surely expanding belly. A good side-effect is that I spend the walks listening to podcasts that I would never otherwise manage to listen to. However, it’s possibly fair to assume that this time may otherwise have been spent blogging which is why things have been a lot quieter here over the past year or so.

Then, just when I was ready to get back into the swing of things, all of my websites were knocked out by that exploding transformer. Then a different issue put my websites out of action on Tuesday as well! All-in-all, I lost about three days of possible blogging activity.

And then I got some good news. I’ve got a degree, and it’s a 2:1. It was such a relief — I was genuinely worried that I was headed for a 2:2 which would have been seriously demoralising. I would really have kicked myself for a few things if that happened, but somehow I have escaped.

I still don’t know the marks for all of my courses yet, which is quite frustrating. Of the scores that I know, I was on course for a 2:2. And I am sure I muffed up one of the exams that I haven’t had back yet. I’d love to think it was my dissertation that pulled the whole lot up. Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about that now. What matters is that I’ll be doing the silly dressing up thing with the stupid hats and scroll things later this month. (Incidentally, does anyone know where the hell you get a white bow tie in this area? That is the rubbish I am being asked to wear for this thing.)

All of this is just a really long-winded way of saying: yes, I know, it’s quiet round here. Jeff said that the scarcity posts is made up for with thorough detail. That is really a side-effect of the fact that it takes me so bloody long to get round to writing anything. By the time I’ve reached this little screen my head has collected so many thoughts on the issue that I end up writing a bloomin’ essay. Even this post is probably about 2,000 words long now.

The thing is, just because I’m not posting much on this blog doesn’t mean I’m not posting much at all. There are four other major outlets of mine. Twitter is the main one where I post anything that will fit into the 140 character limit. Then there is Delicious where I post interesting links, often along with a pithy comment. Then there are the two other blogs, Scottish Roundup and vee8.

These all have a presence on the sidebar here, but I thought it would be good to have an area where all of these various updates are gathered on one page. I started with a lifestream (launched a few weeks ago, though I kept it quiet). But I wanted something a bit different so I spent a bit of time in Yahoo! Pipes to create what I have modestly called the “megafeed“. For the time being I’ve placed it just above the lifestream on… the lifestream page.

Neither of them is exactly perfect. The lifestream just contains the headlines of each item. It incorporates Last.fm as well, but it’s pretty rough and ready really. Meanwhile, the megafeed just looks like a big list of stuff. There’s no way to tell whether it’s a Twitter update, a blog post or what. I tried to make it more obvious, but either there isn’t a way to do it in Yahoo! Pipes or I am too much of a n00b to work out how to do it. Just thought I’d mention it since I spent a bit of time on it. Think of it as a stalking opportunity.

Now that I have sorted that out, it is time to post not just in the four other places but here as well. Now I have drawn up a little list of posts I want to write. My calendar for this week looks fairly empty. I should probably be looking for a job but I will try to get some stuff up here too.

I’ve you’ve been trying to visit any of my websites for the past 36 hours or so, you will have been out of luck. It was all the fault of an exploding transformer (that’s the last time I call Optimus Prime ugly, boom boom). In that sense, I suppose I can be lucky that no data has been lost.

Apparently the outage has affected thousands of websites. A couple of high-profile casualties include Statcounter and B3ta so I was in good company. We should have organised a little meet up so that we could hug each other and tell us it was okay. If only we had a way of communicating with the outside world…

Incidentally, B3ta is still not back up while I am. That’s obviously a reflection of the importance of my website. The downage of B3ta means means that, on this Monday, in offices across the land, there is the threat that some work might actually get done.

Anyway, it’s a good test along the lines of those thought experiments: “could you survive a day without blogging? Har har har.” “Could you survive a day without email? Ho ho!” The answer is yes and yes. This is probably helped a lot by the fact that I can’t actually be bothered to blog every day any more anyway.

However, it did mean that this week’s Scottish Roundup had to be delayed by over a day. I was writing the post when the explosion happened. I knew something was awry because WordPress’s autosaves weren’t happening. I was hoping that it would be a temporary outrage. Stayed up a bit. Gave up to try again in the morning. I was most peeved when it still wasn’t there in the morning. But I lived, and it’s better late than never.

As for email, I don’t know whether that was working or not. I assume not. I sent myself a test email last night from a different account and it came through this morning. But I don’t know if there is other mail floating around waiting for me to receive. My ego will not allow myself to believe that the only email sent to me yesterday was by myself. So anyway, if you have sent me an email since around 10 or 11pm on Saturday night, I haven’t received it. Just so you know.