But I have much less spare time on my hands than I used to, and I find it increasingly difficult to find time to do it. Also, I have realised that I don’t love blogs as much as I used to, and can’t cheerlead in the way I was able to in the early days.

However, I don’t think it would be right to just pull the plug on Scottish Roundup. So if anyone is interested in taking over the running of Scottish Roundup, please get in contact with me! Alternatively, if anyone could work out a good way of spreading the workload among a group of people, that could be a workable solution too.

If I think someone can continue to push Scottish Roundup forward in the right direction, we can make it happen. Just now I think that it is stagnating and I can’t do the Scottish blogosphere justice anymore.

Email me: duncan@doctorvee.co.uk.

But it is not intended to be a glorified back-slapping extravaganza. It is to be a celebration of blogging following what has been a difficult end to the year for some Scottish blogs.

It is also intended to be a way of discovering new blogs. Without a doubt, the most difficult aspect of running Scottish Roundup is trying to find new blogs. If you are pressed for time (and who isn’t?), it is easy to keep on featuring the same blogs week after week — and Scottish Roundup fell into that trap.

This is a conscious effort to turn that tide. For that reason, self nominations are encouraged. In turn, I am hoping that this will encourage more people to nominate blogs for the regular weekly roundup.

I am still looking for two or three more panellists to help out on the awards — so please get in touch if you’re up for it. Any help on what the categories should be would be much appreciated too.

The nominations phase will end on 13 January, and voting will end on 27 January. The winners will be unveiled soon afterwards.

On Twitter, @milkmiruku said: “how bout an RL BBQ at some point? maybe even with debates or suchlike?” Then in the comments, Yousuf and Steve chipped in, which led me to wonder if it’s time for another bloggers’ meetup of some sort.

I’m not sure about having a barbecue with debates just yet — maybe in the future! But certainly, on the back of the success of previous meetups, I think it’s worth having another informal chit-chat. Last time, Iain Macwhirter turned up unannounced, so you never know what might happen at our next one!

Right now, on Malc’s suggestion we’re thinking of holding it in Edinburgh sometime during the last week of the festival, which I make the week beginning 31 August (Update: Or week beginning 24 August). If anyone has any thoughts, let us know. Of course I’ll keep you updated with any plans we concoct.

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.

The first story I saw about her blog in the media was actually not completely negative. The article noted that her blog has attracted a loyal following and seemed to appreciate the eclecticism of the blog.

I do like the Indygal blog. It is a friendly and humorous read. Anne McLaughlin’s new job also means that for the first time a Scottish Roundup editor has become an MSP. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few others become MSPs as well…

The way The Guardian‘s article was written did rather outline the potential for a less favourable spin to be put on the blog.

In other posts, she has branded the colourful Labour MSP Lord George Foulkes as an “ignoramous”, called Labour MSP Frank McAveety “the daftest man in the parliament” and described the historian and nationalist MSP Christopher Harvie as a “splendid nutter”. She branded an SNP councillor in Glasgow who defected to Labour in one uncompromising posting as The Ego.

Today there has been much huffing and puffing over a post from a couple of weeks ago containing “surreptitiously taken” photographs of goings-on inside the Parliament building. On the surface, claims that it damages the trust among MSPs and staff may seem reasonable. But looking at the post it’s clear that it was tongue-in-cheek and rather innocuous. The fuss stinks more of party political points scoring than anything else.

Still, it throws into focus once again the dangers of being a blogger. This is by no means the first time a blog post has thrown a spanner in the works of a political career.

By-election candidate Jody Dunn broke ground in 2004 when she blogged during her campaign in Hartlepool. The Guardian said she was blogging her way to by-election history. Unfortunately for Ms Dunn, it was her own political career that was history after the Labour campaign capitalised on a tongue-in-cheek post in which she described all the locals as “either drunk, flanked by an angry dog, or undressed.”

The Labour Party has felt the effects of ill-advised blogging as well. When Gavin Yates became the then-leader of the Scottish Labour Party Wendy Alexander’s head of communications, he probably wasn’t banking on being caught out by his own communications from the past. His blog had been less than complimentary about the Labour Party. But even though he never wrote anything truly damaging, the media still pounced on it, and it added to the long list of woes that beset Wendy Alexander’s brief period as Labour leader.

It all comes back to that old chestnut — how will an employer react to your blog? This is a sticky one that has long vexed me. Never before have the personal views and lives of people been on such public display. Not just through blogs either. The social networking phenomenon means that people are volunteering information about themselves to others in a way that was never possible.

It is near ubiquitous among people my age. My generation will run into these difficulties first. For instance, how might a potential employer react to all of this freely-available information? One point of view is that having this information out in the open will disadvantage you. But if everyone else is doing it, we are more or less back to square one.

Not quite though. Some people will have their illegal activities recorded on Facebook or Bebo. Others will have pristine profiles that arouse no suspicion, even of the consumption of a quiet pint. But might these people be seen as anti-social and one-dimensional by employers?

With my blog, I have basically constructed a database of my opinions going back to 2002, when I was 16 years old. I’m sure most people are quite thankful that their 16-year-old selves are long forgotten. Might I be disadvantaged by something I wrote three, four, five years ago? It might be something that now seems gauche, or an opinion that today I may not agree with — something I don’t even remember writing.

There have probably never been more laws preventing employers from discriminating against people with certain personal attributes. But ironically, today’s technology enables employers to access a wealth of candidates’ personal information like never before.

The thing is, we all volunteer that information. I think a few people from this generation will get their fingers burnt here. We like to think we are savvy enough to deal with it, but we are still fumbling around in the dark. We are all self-taught and we will make mistakes.

Future generations will be taught by their superiors, in the same way that parents today think nothing of teaching their children about etiquette and other rules of society. If I come to view my decision to blog openly from a young age as a mistake, I would warn any children I had not to. But I would have had no way of knowing.

Similarly, Anne McLaughlin was hardly to know two weeks ago that she would be an MSP and find her blogging activities land her in a spot of bother. I suspect in the long term this will blow over, but we’ll probably see a different style of Indygal — that is, indeed, if she returns to blogging at all.

One of the best Scottish political bloggers around, Kezia Dugdale, took her blog down for a few months, saying it was “far too risky a past-time”. Now she is back in the blogosphere, but “smarter with how, when and what I post.”

Ideally, it would be good if politicians could blog freely, without fearing that it will be used against them in the future. I very much agree with Bellgrove Belle. The faux-furore surrounding the Indygal blog is pretty much a non-story. But — in life in general, but particularly in the highly charged world of party politics — these things will happen.

That’s a real shame because I think people like Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale do a lot to help engage people in the political process.

I had, however, hoped that more people would nominate more posts. Unfortunately, it has never reached more than a trickle (normally, only one or two posts are nominated per week). So even if I am not editing the roundup myself, I still provide a lot of my own suggestions, and I also usually step in if a guest was unable to do it.

But often I don’t have the time I need to produce a decent roundup every two or three weeks. And this is before I have found myself a full-time job! Add in the recent addition of the non-political roundup, and I find myself trying to find more ways to reduce Scottish Roundup’s dependence on my time.

It would also be unfair of me to ask Will Patterson, who does such an excellent job on the roundup every third week, to pick up all of the slack.

As such, I have decided to try and set up a team of perhaps five or ten people who are willing to chip in on a regular basis. Primarily, it would involve suggesting a handful of posts every week. Hopefully that way the roundup can contain dozens of great posts with relatively little effort. It would also be helpful if some people would be willing to edit the roundup on a semi-regular basis, perhaps once every two or three months.

It would be good if there was some political balance on the team as well — maybe one blogger for each of the five major parties and a few independents. This isn’t vital, but it’s an idea.

I’m not just looking for help on the political roundup. I probably need even more help on the non-political roundup, because in my experience it is much harder to compile the non-political roundup, mostly because there are so many more blogs and it is stressful to think that I might be overlooking a complete gem of a post!

So if anyone is interested in becoming involved in helping out with Scottish Roundup on a more regular basis, please let me know. Email me at scottishroundup@gmail.com.

If you’re not so keen on being involved that often, but you still fancy editing every once in a while, I’m always looking for more editors. And I have no way of knowing who does and doesn’t want to do the roundup, so if you fancy it then please don’t be shy in coming forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.