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

There was much hand-wringing among bloggers a couple of weeks ago in the wake of an article about blogging written by Iain Macwhirter. I didn’t take much notice of it at the time. After all, it is not exactly surprising that an established media figure would take a swipe at blogging. And if there is one thing less surprising than that, it is the reaction of bloggers to such a piece. I’ve seen it too many times to get very worked up about the whole thing.

Bloggers raised their eyebrows over Iain Macwhirter’s decision to resort to lines such as, “Bloggers don’t write, they ejaculate.” The controversy deepened when he decided to launch into ad hominem attacks on a couple of prominent bloggers.

But it seems as though I was wise (albeit accidentally) to sit back and spectate (though I acknowledge the irony in the fact that I have now taken the bait). Because it turns out that Iain Macwhirter was pulling a stunt of sorts. It was all a demonstration of how the structure of the blogosphere encourages personal attacks and controversialism. It turns out that Will P was sort of right in his hunch (or hope) that it was all a joke. I have to say, well played Mr Macwhirter. The experiment certainly worked.

So let us strip away the personal attacks and the controversial language, taking as read that Iain Macwhirter doesn’t really mean it. It is worth considering his points.

The original article was prompted by the controversy surrounding emails sent between Damian McBride and Derek Draper. To me it seems odd to launch into a critique of blogging on the back of this. Damian McBride is not a blogger. He is (was) a political aide.

Derek Draper was a blogger, but only for a period of about four months. He has a great deal more experience working for Labour, as he has done on and off for the best part of twenty years. Labour List has been widely derided as a ham-fisted attempt to contrive the shape of Labour’s presence on the blogosphere. It was a failure because it came across as inauthentic and insincere — a top-down approach to a bottom-down medium.

Quite why the focus should be on the fact that this dirty work was done for a blog beats me. McBride and Draper are figures of the political establishment. Their behaviour doesn’t reflect badly on blogging. It reflects badly on politics.

In fairness, though, Iain Macwhirter is also critical of Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. I am often frustrated with the way the media often focuses on these two blogs whenever it examines blogging. I’m not a particular fan of either blog, and I do not regularly read them.

It is no surprise that the media focuses on them though. They are probably the two blogs that adhere most closely to the model built by the media: hungry for scoops, greedy for a scalp, anxious to have more readers, tempted to sensationalise, trading on gossip.

Iain Dale can probably be comfortably described as a member of the political establishment. Paul Staines too, though probably to a lesser extent. He is also unashamed to admit that he models his blog on tabloid values.

This is all fine and well. It has its place, even if it is not personally my cup of tea. But it is a bit irritating that the media constantly focuses on these big blogs written by those with political connections. If I want to read a sensationalist view from inside the Westminster bubble, I can pick up any tabloid — or, indeed, broadsheet — newspaper. The unique selling point of blogging is not to be found in the likes of Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes.

The true beauty of blogging is the fact that it gives the little person a say, and provides a platform for niche interests. You don’t need to shift hundreds of thousands of copies or generate hundreds of thousands of uniques for your content to matter. You can be writing to a dozen people and it will add something to the world. The economics of newspapers meant that this couldn’t happen in the past.

Failing to understand this is the mistake Iain Macwhirter makes when he assesses the blogosphere. The value doesn’t just come from big numbers, and the brash approach that this necessitates. Most of the aspects of blogging that Mr Macwhirter bemoans are actually just failings of of big blogs. Even then, big blogs are close to being like mainstream media outlets. Nowadays there is less of a clear dividing line between the media and the citizens. It is more like a continuum.

As such, the failings of big blogs are actually quite similar to the failings of major media outlets. He says “nothing on the web can be longer than a couple of hundred words”, which is a bit strange because most posts on this blog are around 1,000 words long and I don’t have many problems with that. Check out two of the best blogs in Scotland, J Arthur Macnumpty and Ideas of Civilisation. There is not a 200 word long post to be found.

It is the broadcast media that has merrily ushered in the era of the soundbite — out of fear that viewers or listeners will switch off. Bloggers have a relative freedom to gas on for as long as they want. While television stations stake their entire existence on having massive audience figures, bloggers (with the exception of a very lucky few) will not go out of business if people stop visiting. We do it for the love of it, not because we have to make our living out of it. As Yousuf points out:

The vast majority of bloggers, and 100% of Scottish bloggers, do so as a hobby and not as a primary source of income. This means that increased readership is pleasant and ego-boosting but not necessary for survival so we can write what we wish to. If anything it is the mainstream press who are beholden to being cheap and sensationalist.

Mr Macwhirter goes on to say that “immediacy is everything on the blog, and it is a medium which positively discourages reflection and any kind of serious thought.” But it is the mainstream media that cultivated the 24 hour news culture as much as thirty years ago. Moreover, unlike a 24 hour news channel, a blogger doesn’t have to keep on churning out content 24 hours a day.

As readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I am perfectly content to surface every couple of weeks, write a couple of in-depth posts and disappear for a bit again. Many other bloggers are like this. That’s because, unlike the mainstream media, bloggers don’t have an obligation to react immediately. We are quite comfortable with reflection, because in this medium you can do it at whichever pace you want. If only the media had that freedom.

He continues: “Blogging is all about traffic and and achieving critical mass.” As if the media would be able to continue if it didn’t have any traffic. On the contrary, it is bloggers who can can afford to have fewer eyeballs. If people stop buying newspapers, the newspaper goes out of business. If people stop reading blogs… nothing happens.

Blogging is not just about numbers. To believe that it is would be simply to project the motivations of the media onto blogging. The value that people get out of blogging is much more subtle than that.

Part two of this article will be published tomorrow

My view has long been that blogging is best consumed as a complement to professional journalism, as you’ll see if you read the piece. But of coruse there are other views out there, which the article also represents.

There are a few points I thought I’d mention, just to expand on or clarify a few points. It’s worth remembering what we mean when we talk about web stats. It’s a thorny area, and there isn’t really a good way to accurately estimate how many unique visitors a website has. I tend to look at visits rather than unique visitors because I think it’s more unambiguous.

I was a bit vague on the telephone about how many visitors this blog gets. I knew that all of my blogs put together get over 10,000 visits per month (this is the number I keep in my head because it’s nice and round, and it’s also sufficiently large to sound relatively impressive). In this case, it’s bad luck that the number of unique visitors to this blog in the month in question was 8,465. Not quite the >10,000 mentioned in the article, though if you throw in the numbers for my F1 blog vee8 it nudges above 10,000 unique visitors.

Apparently 10,000 per month is a similar readership to many local newspapers. I don’t know if this refers to the circulation of the hard copy or the figures for a local paper’s website.

Certain bloggers, who regularly post indulgent stat pr0n posts, get quite excited about how many visitors they get. But it’s worth remembering just how meaningless most visits actually are. Okay, this blog gets roughly 10,000 visitors a month. But it would be pure delusion to believe that there are 10,000 people out there who just can’t wait to read what I have to say.

Only an eighth of those visitors came here directly (i.e. on purpose). Over two-thirds of the visitors to this blog come from search engines. Of these, 94% have never come across this blog before. And 86% of search engine visitors to this blog look at one page and leave, spending on average a paltry 40 seconds here. They will probably never come back again, no doubt having failed to find what they were looking for. All-in-all, only 13% of this blog’s readers are returning for a second visit. Kudos to the 1% who have visited 100 times or more.

Of course, as always, these statistics come with all sorts of health warnings. Then there is the fact that many people are able to read blogs without ever having to visit, thanks to the magic of RSS. For what it’s worth, according to Feedburner, 270 people are subscribed to this blog.

Partly because of all the problems of getting accurate figures, I don’t get as hung up on stats as I used to. I like to know where traffic is coming from if someone has linked to this blog, but the numbers don’t excite me as much any more.

It’s come a long way though. I remember when I started out blogging, I used to be a bit freaked out when I saw the blog had had 60 visits in a day. That must have meant that I had (accidentally) said something too controversial or someone had ripped me to shreds and linked to it. Given that I was so young when I started blogging, they were probably right to do so. Eventually, getting 60 a day was the norm. Now 300 a day is a disappointment.

In the piece I am quoted as saying, “The average age of a blogger is around 40.” I don’t think that’s quite what I said (and I certainly didn’t intend to say that). I think the average age of the readers of political blogs is 40. My impression — it’s just a guess — is that the bloggers themselves are generally younger than that. But the point about blogging is that it can be — and is — done by people from all sorts of backgrounds. The eclecticism of the blogosphere is, of course, one of its biggest attractions.

As for the idea that the average reader of a political blog is aged 40, this is something I heard or read a long time ago and the source is long lost. I do like to pluck it out from time to time though to illustrate that blogging is not just a young person’s game. A quick search has yielded this study (PDF) which found that the median age of a political blog reader in the USA in 2006 was 49.

Another thing I wanted to mention was that the piece says that Guido Fawkes broke the story about North Lanarkshire Council’s head of communications job. In fact, my post about it was published about an hour before Guido’s, though I understand if more people came to learn about it through Guido. It’s also true that Gudio went a lot further, by actually naming the people involved, which I was reluctant to do.

Anyway, it’s great to have been quoted so much in the Sunday Herald this morning. I don’t mean to come across as sniping — inaccuracies are always bound to creep in, and you certainly couldn’t say that bloggers are much less error-prone.

One of the great things about having a blog though is that it allows me to clarify a couple of things which I said when I was working from the top of my head. That is one area where the blogosphere definitely has the upper hand over traditional media. On an open blog, some pedant like me will soon be along to point out the mistakes in the comments section. But the newspaper will never be corrected.

Twitter is used by different people for a wide variety of purposes now. But due to the space constraints, it requires a fair bit of creativity on the Twitter user’s part. Twitter has almost developed a language of its own.

Very quickly, a convention developed whereby @username signified that this tweet is a reply to one of that user’s recent tweets. Twitter recognised this and built the functionality into the system. Later on, #hashtag acted as a tag for your tweet, the idea being to make it easy to find tweets on certain subjects using a site like #hashtags or Twitter’s own search function. Even more recently, the retweet (now commonly signified by RT) has emerged as a popular way to share other people’s great tweets.

What does this have to do with social bookmarking? Well, a large amount of retweets are just interesting links. That means that a lot of original tweets are just interesting links. But hang on — isn’t a social bookmarking service like Delicious more suitable for sharing interesting links?

It should be, but it’s not. Now let us get one thing straight here. I am a huge fan of Delicious. I have been using it for over four years now, and in that time I have amassed a collection of 7,493 bookmarks across my three accounts. And I won’t stop using it any time soon.

But sometimes, I find it much more satisfying to just paste a URL into Twitter and share the link that way. It is pretty clear that a lot of people do too.

Take the two most recent posts on this blog: ‘Why are newspapers hiding their niche content?‘ and ‘The Edinburgh Twestival‘. Both of these posts were shared around a bit on Twitter.

Certainly, you would expect that for a post about the Edinburgh Twestival. People interested in that post are likely to be Twitter users. This post was shared by five different people (including, it has to be said, me) on Twitter. Four of them were retweets of my original tweet. Google Analytics suggests that 15 visitors landed on the page from the Twitter website (and that doesn’t include any visits that came from Twitter clients, Twitter streams embedded on webpages, etc.). No one shared it on Delicious.

As for the post about RSS feeds, it was shared by four people on Twitter (including me again), one of which was a retweet. It was also shared by four people on Delicious. But three of those people are also the three people who shared it on Twitter! Delicious doesn’t timestamp entries, but I am pretty sure all of them posted to Delicious after posting it to Twitter (let me know if I’m wrong about that). Very probably, two of them discovered it through Twitter rather than anywhere else. So far, the post has had 18 visitors from Twitter, and just five from Delicious.

So is Twitter doing the job of sharing interesting links better than Delicious, the daddy of social bookmarking sites? Almost certainly. And it struck me why while I watched the video currently sitting on the dead / dormant Ma.gnolia website. Ma.gnolia was another social bookmarking website, that was recently taken down for good by a massive database problem. The video is a post-mortem on Ma.gnolia, but it also feels a little bit like a post-mortem on social bookmarking as a whole.

During the interview, Larry Halff points out that the biggest link-sharing website is not Delicious as is commonly suggested — it’s Facebook. It reminds me of the often-forgotten fact that the biggest photo-sharing website is not Flickr, nor is it even Imageshack or Photobucket — it’s Facebook.

This is not because Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing your photos — far from it. Nor is it remotely as good as Delicious for link-sharing. But Facebook is certainly the best place for sharing your photos and link-sharing. That is for one simple reason: Facebook has more users, meaning that you can reach more people more quickly. It’s what Facebook like to call the social graph. It doesn’t matter if the functionality is a bit basic. What matters is that all your friends are on it.

Twitter is no Facebook. While most of my “real life” friends are on Facebook, Twitter has just a smattering of my real life friends. But I follow a great deal of people whose content I just find interesting — bloggers and other online associates with whom I have built a digital acquaintanceship over the years.

Most importantly when it comes to reaching a large amount of people, I know that Twitter is extremely addictive. I know that dozens of my Twitter followers will have a Twitter application of some kind open. I am watching the messages from them tumble down the screen all the time. It feels like I’m having a conversation. I know that I will reach a lot of people by posting a link in Twitter. Then I could have a conversation with people who are interested in that link.

That sense of vibrancy just isn’t there in Delicious. The reason? This social bookmarking service just isn’t social enough. Its social functionality basically extends to being able to add other users to your ‘network’, and being able to inform them of links you think they will find interesting by using a special tag. And that’s it. There are no comments. There is no conversation. There is near enough no social. Just lists of links.

Is there the scope for a TweetDeck-style Delicious application? You could leave it open all day and watch the links from your friends stream in, just as we watch our friends’ tweets. You could use the notes section to leave comments (have a conversation). There could be special tags that allow you to use the notes section to reply to your friends.

I have seen people tag their bookmarks as via:username to signify how they found the link — but Delicious doesn’t appear to recognise it in any special way. Twitter were really smart to capitalise on the @replies convention, because it has made Twitter much more of a social tool. Delicious feels stagnant in comparison. But it seems like it could be easy to fix. So why don’t they?

This seems quite unusual to me. To access these stats for my websites, I need to log in with a password. Surely most other people do for their websites as well. But for the most expensive website for an MSP, such basic security measures do not seem to be in place. When you consider the possibility that search logs may contain constituents’ sensitive information, it seems to be quite an oversight.

There is one upside though. This free access to Charlie Gordon’s stats does give us the ability to calculate just how much value for money the taxpayer is getting out of his website.

For those who missed it, last month the Scottish Parliament released MSPs’ expense claims. The Scottish Parliament website allows you to search for expense claims by category. One of the categories is ‘Website Costs’, giving us the ability to see just what MSPs are spending on their websites.

It made the news that Charlie Gordon’s website was the most expensive of all the MSPs — by a very long way. Duncan Cumming conducted a full analysis. Charlie Gordon claimed £12,822.62 in website costs for the financial year 2007–2008. The next largest claim was by John Wilson, who claimed £2,291.25 — less than a fifth of what Charlie Gordon claimed.

For what it’s worth, Charlie Gordon released a statement on his website. There is no permalink for it, so you will have to scroll down — it’s (erroneously) dated 23 January 2008. It says: “My website costs for 2007/08 were around £1,700; not £12,900 as stated erroneously on the Scottish Parliament’s website!”

The MSP claims that only 20% of the costs outlined by the Scottish Parliament went on the website itself, the rest being paid for “call handling”. It is worth pointing out that even if we take Charlie Gordon’s claims at face value, a £1,700 claim would still make his website the second most expensive MSP’s website.

Here are the full details of the expense claims as laid out by the Scottish Parliament:

Claim Month: November 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,709.38
Additional Info: ADMINISTRATION AND WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Claim Month: October 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,441.61
Additional Info: ADMINISTRATION AND WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Claim Month: November 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

Claim Month: September 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,200.00
Additional Info: ADMINISTRATION AND WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Claim Month: August 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,932.00

Claim Month: July 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

Claim Month: June 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,152.00

Claim Month: July 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,032.00

Claim Month: April 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

Claim Month: April 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £804.00

Claim Month: May 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £708.00

Claim Month: March 2008
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £144.00

Claim Month: January 2008
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,464.00

Claim Month: December 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,044.43

Claim Month: September 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

The pongy whiff intensifies when you read the press reports which noted that GMG Solutions is in fact run by Charlie Gordon’s son, Gavin. As Heather from Idea15 noted, GMG Solutions “does not have a web site, a portfolio, or any basic contact information, and from that we can infer that they do not exist.”

Heather was none too impressed by the website:

It’s done in table layout, its base colour is flamingo pink, it uses Flash for basic navigation buttons, and it has 45 basic coding errors. Worryingly, there are no analytics counters or codes, which means the MSP neither knows nor cares why people might be reading his site.

Moreover, the poor design of the website means that it actually may be in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.

As Heather pointed out, the navigation buttons are Flash files. This is totally unnecessary, limits web accessibility and makes it more difficult for Google and other search engines to find pages.

Indeed, Charlie Gordon’s stats show that in January 2009, while the home page accounted for 1,792 hits, the eight navigation buttons (which appear on every page of the website, not just the home page) accounted for an average of just 1,324 hits. This is a clear indication that many users are unable to properly navigate through the site. This could be easily diagnosed by a quick look at the statistics (as I have just done), yet no action has been taken to remedy it.

In fairness, there are plain text links at the bottom of the page. But why should users be made to scroll all the way to the bottom of each page just to navigate through the website? The plain text links should instead be at the top of the page, where the Flash buttons currently are.

Guess when people became interested in Charlie Gordon’s website?

January’s stats for Charlie Gordon’s website show a huge spike on 23 January, the day the expense claims were released. Traffic did not return to normal levels until the very end of the month, so I will look at the period 1 January 2009–22 January 2009.

Between those dates, Charlie Gordon’s website received an average of just 54.8 visits per day. The maximum was 80 visits on 5 January. The minimum was 0 visits, achieved on both 17 and 18 January. These are outliers, so I assume that the website was down on these days. So even with Charlie Gordon spending £13,000 £1,700 per year, he can not arrange a vaguely reliable service. Considering the website is supposed to be a valuable resource to his constituents, this is a poor show.

The statistics for the whole of December 2008 are not much better. The website received just 63.7 visits per day that month.

We don’t yet know what Charlie Gordon claimed in website expenses for January 2009 or December 2008. But we do know that his largest claim in one month for the 2007–2008 financial year was £1,932.00 in August 2007. The public also has access to his web stats for that month, allowing us to calculate just how much value for money his constituents are getting out of his website.

Charlie Gordon’s website received 561 visits throughout the month of August 2007. This translates to just 18.1 visits per day. It is worth remembering that all Webalizer stats include robots (i.e. non-human visitors) such as Googlebot. As such, all of these visitor statistics are generous estimates!

Making the calculation, we can see that Charlie Gordon spent £3.44 per visit on his website that month. Even if we accept Charlie Gordon’s assertion that the website costs were in fact 20% of what the Scottish Parliament lists, this is still 69p per visit to the website (including robots). This is quite simply extortionate.

For comparison, I will use the same methodology to analyse the costs of my websites. I actually make more money on my websites than I spend on them, but I understand that advertising may not be an option on a publicly funded MSP’s website. So I will look solely at the costs of running my websites. This, too, is slightly flawed because I don’t pay anyone any wages to maintain my websites. This is purely my blood, sweat and tears, and maybe MSPs are too busy to do that. It is, nonetheless, an interesting exercise that will bring Charlie Gordon’s figures into perspective.

For the month of December 2008 I paid £7.67 (and £1.50 of this was a charge for using my debit card) for webhosting to last me for that month. I ran six websites during that month. During that time, these websites received 75,849 visits in total according to the same Webalizer package. This translates to a cost of £0.0001 (one hundredth of a penny) per visit. This is infinitesimal compared to Charlie Gordon’s figure of £3.44 69p per visit.

Incidentally, figures provided by Webalizer are much larger than any figures provided by any other stats package which excludes robots. Google Analytics, for instance, counts only human visits. It says that my sites collectively received 11,184 visits during the month of December 2008. This is just 14.7% of the figure given to me by Webalizer.

Assuming Charlie Gordon receives the same ratio of robot visitors to human visitors as I do, this would give him just 2.7 visitors per day for August 2007. As Heather pointed out, there appear to be no analytics codes installed on Charlie Gordon’s website, so we’ll never know just how many visitors Charlie Gordon gets or got. But it really could be as few as three per day or less.

I am not an MSP who is providing a potentially vital public service to his constituents. Nor am I a professional web designer. Yet I manage to get many more visitors, and spend much less money. £1,700 per year for a website is, quite frankly, a rip off. Taxpayers would have every right to be furious — especially since the taxpayer seems to be less than attracted to his website.

I previously covered Charlie Gordon’s website on the Scotweb2 blog.

I didn’t even say anything about Imogen’s mucky video. I haven’t watched it, honest guv! It was that pesky commenter!

Interesting that the latest news about the video has meant much more people searching for information on it, making the previous spike look utterly insignificant.

Normal service will resume as soon as I can be bothered!