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.

Some bloggers are in a flap at the moment because Google has seemingly manually downgraded the PageRank of some websites. The reason appears to be that the websites in question sell paid links.

Some of the websites in question are pretty big. Washington Post, Engadget, Weblog Tools Collection, Joystiq, Problogger.

This blog also sells text links, although I don’t think I’ve been hit by Google’s bitch-slapper. My PageRank at the moment is 5, which I think is what it was before. I don’t actually know, because I don’t really care about my PageRank as much as, say, my Technorati authority or the number of visitors.

Anyway. There are text link adverts on this blog. I was aware that the people who were buying the links were almost certainly more concerned about “buying” a better ranking on Google than something such as click through rates or trying to reach out to the readers of this blog.

But I hate to see junk results on Google, for sure. But do I feel guilty about selling links that contribute to this? No. It is individually rational for me to sell these links, despite the fact that I detest the method.

Why? Because if I am selling the links, I make money from them. If I am not selling the links, Google results are still equally junky because so many other people are doing the same thing. So I have two choices. Either I live with junky Google results and make no money, or I live with junky Google results and make some money. It’s a no-brainer.

Funny, though, how the changes leave Google AdSense completely unaffected! What a coincidence. When you look at how Text Link Ads (probably AdSense’s only real competitor) has been penalised to hell by Google, it begins to look like hypocrisy at best and a powerful Google using its might for “evil” means at worst.

However, it is understandable if Google takes a hard-line stance. They strive to have the best search engine on the internet, so of course they will do everything in their power to stop the “sale of PageRank”.

Their latest moves probably change the landscape a bit. It might put some advertisers off, but I doubt it will put any webmasters off. For as long as the webmasters make one penny more by selling adverts than by not, they will continue to sell adverts.

Of course, the reduction in PageRank could mean fewer people visiting via Google’s search engine. But I doubt many webmasters will be licking their wounds over that. From my point of view, for sure Google accounts for about two thirds of visitors to this website. But that is the least valuable two thirds (I don’t mean ‘valuable’ in monetary terms here, I mean in terms of their contribution to the website).

People who visit this website via Google view fewer pages than an average visitor. They are more likely to take one look at one page and then swiftly leave, never to be seen again. They spend an astonishing 30% less time on this blog than the average visitor. According to Rhys, he gets hardly any visitors from Google in the first place.

So if my PageRank takes a battering, I won’t be too bothered about it. Because Google provides none of the things that I value about blogging. Regular visitors are more likely to come via a link on another blog. And the best comments come from regular readers rather than the flash-in-the-pan visitors who might leave personal abuse then exit and forget all about this blog.

Come to think of it, I am the same when I use Google. I never expect to find the best websites by going to Google. If something is worth reading, I am likely to hear of it by word of mouth, either by reading other blogs or via links from my friends on Delicious, or whatever.

Meanwhile, if I want specific information, I am much more likely to search for it on Wikipedia rather than Google. Wikipedia might not be 100% reliable, but Google’s reliability is surely even worse. If I want a primer on any topic, Wikipedia usually gives me what I want.

What’s more, the links on Wikipedia are usually more relevant. Spam links are swiftly removed by the community of users. How many times has Wikipedia led you to a link farm compared to Google?

If I want information on a band I go to either Last.fm or Discogs. If I want to look up a word I use either Dictionary.com, Chambers of Urban Dictionary. Etc, etc. I know I still sometimes use Google, but what for? I can’t remember the last time I used Google search as anything except a last resort.

I forgot / didn’t have the time to mention it at the time, but a couple of weeks back Scottish Roundup turned one year old.

But it wasn’t the only one — Tartan Hero, Scots and Independent, North to Leith and Granite City were all celebrating last week — mere days after I was bemoaning the lack of SNP blogs. That’ll teach me!

Is it a coincidence that so many great blogs started just after I began Scottish Roundup? Of course not! Unfortunately for me ego, it seems as though an SNP press officer was more influential than me. Pah!

A few weeks ago Grant Thoms drew up a list of the best Scottish political blogs out there. Inevitably, eyebrows were raised.

On the back of that, Holyrood Watcher said:

As far as I can determine, his league table was not based on objective criteria (but it was none the worse for that). I have been musing on how to introduce an element of rationality into the assessment.

Holyrood Watcher’s approach was to use Bloglines subscriptions to try and figure out which blogs were the most read. It’s quite a common method, although not without its faults — as I pointed out in my comment at Holyrood Chronicles.

Another popular method of ranking blogs is to look at Technorati Authority. Unfortunately, Technorati is more unreliable than the Red Bull Formula 1 car. Some of the stats it generates are clearly wrong. I have come across blogs that have an authority of 0, but still have dozens of ‘reactions’.

In case you’re not au fait with Technorati’s terminology, here is how it works. Authority measures how many different blogs have linked to your blog over the past 180 days. Reactions count the number of links in total that go to your blog.

I have actually gone and done it. I thought it would make a quick and easy post, but I spent hours trawling through Technorati to work out how the Scottish blogs line up. I have not even begun to form a comprehensive list. I have looked at around 60 or 70 different blogs. Of course, most of them are the ones that I am most familiar with. They are not all about politics, but they are all Scottish.

But whenever I thought I was finished, I caught sight of an obvious one that I had missed out. So no doubt I have still missed out quite a lot. If you think I’ve missed something out, leave a comment.

There are all sorts of reasons why you should take this with a pinch of salt. For one thing, there are the technical issues that I have already alluded to. Technorati is perennially broken. I could not get any information whatsoever on three major blogs — Mr Eugenides, A Place to Stand and Blether with Brian. (I think it is safe to assume that under normal circumstances at least two of these blogs would be right at the top.) I am certain that there are several other errors. I simply cannot believe some of these results.

Also, the recent link-fest in the wake of the Alisher Usmanov affair has inflated a lot of people’s authority. I reckon mine went up by 50 or 60! This extra authority will disappear almost completely once 180 days have passed.

Also, it is worth remembering that this method only measures links, and is no reflection of how many people are reading the blog. But there are a number of interesting things that come out from this. Think about the ratio of reactions to authority score. If the ratio is quite high, that means that the blog generates a high amount of conversation on a small number of blogs. This suggests to me that these are really good blogs that, for whatever reason, haven’t got the wider attention they deserve.

As with Holyrood Watcher, I am not a big fan of lists like this. As he says, blogging is not a competition. But I was intrigued to see the lie of the land, as far as Technorati is concerned at least. It is a bit of fun. But it’s nothing more than that — a bit of fun.

The first number is authority. The number in brackets is the number of reactions.

1. Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe — 253 (671)
2. doctorvee — 157 (534)
3. Freedom and Whisky — 147 (452)
4. Musings of a Reactionary Snob — 141 (483)
5. rhetorically speaking.. — 131 (309)
6. A Big Stick and a Small Carrot — 127 (699)
7. Scots and Independent — 126 (306)*
8. Mike Power’s Website – Not A Blog — 115 (1,199)
9. Clairwil — 114 (331)
10. 1820 — 114 (302)
11. J Arthur MacNumpty — 108 (302)
12. Bill’s Comment Page — 105 (201)
13. The Select Society — 100 (266)
14. Amused Cynicism — 90 (138)
15. Love and Garbage — 89 (171)
16. Tartan Hero – 83 (289)
17. Scottish Blogs — 81 (245)
18. Shuggy’s Blog — 79 (391)
19. Backword — 77 (211)
20. Informationally Overloaded — 71 (286)
21. Silversprite — 71 (146)
22. Michael Greenwell — 59 (124)
23. Rolled-up Trousers — 58 (861)
24. Colcam.Image — 53 (137)
25. Havering On — 50 (217)
26. Scottish Roundup — 50 (139)
27. Bloodbus — 47 (127)
28. The Scottish Patient — 43 (129)
29. Councillor Terry Kelly — 40 (476)
30. Islay Blog — 39 (91)
31. Right for Scotland — 36 (257)
32. Ridiculous Politics — 34 (116)
33. Naked Blog — 32 (251)
34. North to Leith — 25 (96)
35. Scottish Tory Boy — 25 (40)
36. Terry Watch — 24 (92)
37. SNP Tactical Voting — 24 (90)
38. Granite City — 23 (76)
39. North East Scotland Nationalists — 23 (50)
40. Indygal — 22 (48)
41. Edinburgh Sucks! — 20 (49)
42. Ian Hamilton QC — 19 (42)
43. leyton.org — 17 (81)
44. Surreptitious Evil — 16 (62)
45. Kezia Dugdale’s Soap Box — 16 (50)
46. Councillor Andrew Burns’ Really Bad Blog — 15 (63)
47. Whoopdedoo — 14 (66)
48. Scottish Futures — 14 (36)
49. Adam Smith Was A Socialist — 14 (24)
50. Holyrood Chronicles — 13 (132)

• Scottish Political News – 36 (74) – listed separately because it is a blog aggregator

Data gathered on Sunday 14^th October evening.

*Scots and Independent recently changed URL. I calculated its ranking by aggregating the scores of the two URLs.

As I said, there are a lot of surprises in there. And it is radically different to the top 20 that Holyrood Watcher posted last week. It goes to show that there is no relationship between the number of readers and the number of links. And neither of these are a measure of importance anyway. No-one in their right mind would objectively rank Holyrood Chronicles as low as 50^th.

At least Holyrood Chronicles is the ninth most-read. As they say, there’s only one thing worse than not being talked about, and that’s being talked about (I got that the right way round, right?).

Something else interesting about this list? As far as I am aware, there are no Lib Dem members on it (although there are a number of Lib Dem voters there I reckon). The highest, that I can make out, is Anything Caron can do… in 55^th. Actually, Caron herself would be higher, but still misses out (just) on the top 50. Should really have checked that before I published this post.

I used to be a big fan of comments, or at least the idea of comments. I thought that news websites should allow comments on every story. It seemed like quite a democratic way of doing things, to allow people to discuss an article, point out biases and the like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honestly, I’ve had enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I the only person who thinks that Technorati’s “WTF” feature is absolutely terrible?

For a start, it has got the worst name ever. I’m sure it seemed like a funny joke at the time. But now it looks silly with “WTF” plastered all over Technorati. For the uninitiated, “WTF” means “What the fuck?” to the cool kids. Technorati devised an oh-so-funny backronym for its new feature: “Where’s the flame?” Uhh.

But not only has it got that awful name, but the feature itself is utterly diabolical. It is supposed to help explain why certain search terms are popular at the moment. But if you wanted to find that out, wouldn’t you just, err, search it and look it up?

Seemingly, any old person can get their terrible writing just one click away from the Technorati front page. Mostly — and this could have been predicted — it is people with bees in their bonnets.

One WTF for Facebook, which is currently in the news for its awesome Facebook Applications, is this:

Recently, Facebook made some changes – to make their site more ‘user friendly’… they even have a link “Spread the Word… Invite your friends to Facebook”…

But if Facebook still has ties to the CIA, DARPA, and Department of Defense… do you think I really wanna invite my friends?!… I’ll let them have at least SOME privacy…

Why are Google and Facebook always hiding their intentions? Why is it that when advocacy groups address their concerns on Privacy Rights… Google and Facebook ignore them? Why aren’t Google and Facebook TRANSPARENT companies like every other ETHICAL business on this PLANET?!

If Google and Facebook are really for Peace and for helping their users… why don’t they correct their ways and SHOW us that they care about our Privacy Rights?

I don’t even know what this means. It doesn’t explain anything about Facebook. It is just a badly written puff piece about privacy — but without making clear exactly what the privacy implications are meant to be. What, for instance, is the supposed link to the CIA about? Any evidence? Any explanation of what the supposed implications are meant to be? Frankly it looks like it was written by a loon.

You could say the same thing about blogs, but the point is that blogs succeed and fail under their own steam. Bad blogs simply do not get read. A bad “WTF” entry is, as I said, one click away from Technorati’s front page.

And while there is an attempt at some kind of Digg-style “wisdom of crowds” democratic moderation, nobody uses it. The WTF I quoted above is currently the second-highest WTF for Facebook, with a grand total of 2 votes. Third, also with a total of 2 votes, is a piece of spam. I think this might have something to do with the fact that WTF is useless, and voting would be a complete waste of time.

Even if you could add comments, so that you could have a discussion around the issues raised in the original ‘blurb’ posting, that would add a great deal to the feature. But then again, this sort of thing is what blogs are meant to be for. And Technorati is meant to be a blog search engine. So this feature ought to be totally redundant. My guess is that it is, and Technorati just don’t realise it.

Why can’t Technorati just concentrate on its constantly broken blog search engine, which is after all what Technorati is meant to be about? These silly features are just a distraction to both visitors and no doubt Technorati’s developers.