HOLYROOD chiefs are to use blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube to make Parliament more accessible to the public, they said today.

People petitioning Parliament will be able to provide videos and photographs.

And Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee is to have its own blog and Wikipedia page.

It’s the mention of Wikipedia — twice — that tweaked my antenna. How exactly does Parliament intend to “use Wikipedia” to become more accessible to the public? Perhaps they meant using wikis, and got that confused with Wikipedia.

I decided to delve a bit further in case The Scotsman got the wrong end of the stick (which, let us face it, is fairly likely). But the Scottish Parliament’s press release seemed even odder.

As from today blogging, Wikipedia and YouTube will be some of the new social media tools introduced by the Public Petitions Committee as part of its report publication. The report is the result of a year-long inquiry into improving awareness and participation in the public petitions process.

Petitioners will be able to provide videos and photos about their petitions as part of the committee’s new blog page. A podcast, Wikipedia page and dvd about the Parliament’s public petitions system all signal the committee’s commitment in encouraging access to and awareness of the petitions process. The committee also supports the creation of local petitioning systems with local authorities.

I was still confused, so I took a look at the Public Petitions Committee’s report to see what the plans actually were. You can read the details of its plans to use social media under the heading “E-Based” (paragraph 84 onwards).

In paragraph 119 the Public Petitions Committee says: “We are launching, alongside this report, a dedicated Public Petitions Committee Wiki page.” The footnote takes you to this Wikipedia article. This is an article which was already deleted when I checked it early this afternoon, and remains deleted as I write this article.

The Public Petitions Committee’s attempt to use Wikipedia like this completely misunderstands what Wikipedia is for. A page such as the one the Public Petitions Committee tried to create is completely against Wikipedia guidelines. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not some kind of worthy version of Craigslist. They could try reading about What Wikipedia is not, notably that Wikipedia is not a soapbox:

Wikipedia is not a soapbox, a battleground, or a vehicle for propaganda and advertising… Therefore, content hosted in Wikipedia is not… [p]ropaganda, advocacy, or recruitment of any kind, commercial, political, religious, or otherwise…

[Content hosted in Wikipedia is not] Self-promotion. It can be tempting to write about yourself or projects in which you have a strong personal involvement. However, do remember that the standards for encyclopedic articles apply to such pages just like any other, including the requirement to maintain a neutral point of view, which is difficult when writing about yourself or about projects close to you.

An subject is considered worthy of an article on Wikipedia by the bottom-up processes upon which Wikipedia is based. It is not for the Public Petitions Committee to swan in and create a page for itself. Nor can it be the final arbiter on what that article contains. The report somewhat states in somewhat Orwellian fashion:

We are of course mindful of the ability to amend text given the ‘ongoing principle’ under which Wiki pages are created. Our clerks will monitor the page carefully to ensure it remains a factual and authoritative source of information about our public petitions process.

Moreover, Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook or scientific journal:

Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook. Wikipedia articles should not read like… Internet guides. Wikipedia articles should not exist only to describe the nature, appearance or services a website offers, but should describe the site in an encyclopedic manner, offering detail on a website’s achievements, impact or historical significance…

In paragraph 109, the Public Petitions Committee itself says of its attempts to use social media that it is “not seen as ticking a box which says ‘look, we are doing this because everyone else is!’”. But this Wikipedia stunt has box-ticking written all over it. It has Dad-dancing written all over it.

I’m sure using Wikipedia to publicise the Scottish Parliament’s petitions process seemed like a good suggestion in a meeting room somewhere. But they could have done with having a bit more of an understanding of what Wikipedia actually is before actually proceeding with the idea.

Luckily, the Public Petitions Committee didn’t put all of its eggs in one basket. There will also be a “pod cast”, which currently seems to be a solitary MP3, tucked away at the bottom of the press release. Other than that, there is a promise to link to the Scottish Parliament’s own podcasts. There is no RSS feed and no option to subscribe.

Let’s look it up on the Public Petitions Committee’s new best friend Wikipedia. The article for Podcast is currently illustrated with a massive RSS icon. It says:

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication. The syndication aspect of the delivery is what differentiates podcasts from other ways of accessing files, such as simple download or streaming: it means that special client software applications known as podcatchers (such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes or Nullsoft’s Winamp) can automatically identify and retrieve new files in a series when they are made available, by accessing a centrally-maintained web feed that lists all files currently associated with that particular podcast. The files thus automatically downloaded are then stored locally on the user’s computer or other device, for offline use.

I therefore await the launch of some actual podcasts, not just MP3s branded as “pod casts”.

The Public Petitions Committee will also have a “blog page”. That can be found here and, in fairness, it doesn’t look all that bad. It looks like a good way to highlight the work of the Public Petitions Committee.

I think organisations like the Scottish Parliament should be using social media and web technologies more. So the Public Petitions Committee’s steps in this direction are welcome. The blog looks particularly promising.

But engaging with the public is about so much more than tossing around buzzwords like ‘Wikipedia’, ‘YouTube’ and ‘podcasts’. A proper understanding of social media would provide a better service to the public and waste fewer resources.

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.

In a way you can understand the lack of information from before the 1990s on the web. After all, the web didn’t exist until 1989. But the meticulous recording of events since the invention of the web is dizzying. It’s good in some ways, but sometimes I come across a piece of useless information that makes me think, “Really, what is the point of that? Who thought it was worth their while to put this on the internet?”

A home for a large proportion of this useless information is Wikipedia. I should point out that I am generally in favour of Wikipedia as a quick and easy way to plug embarrassing gaps in your knowledge. And I think a lot of the criticisms some people make of Wikipedia are quite wide of the mark.

Wikipedia churns out astonishingly mind-bending articles like 0.999…, Architecture of Windows NT and Equipartition theorem. But Wikipedia also contains masses of articles concerning contemporary popular culture.

I do not at all mind Wikipedia carrying such articles (I read many of them myself), but it has to be said that the quality decreases pretty rapidly. Sometimes I read something in Wikipedia and can’t believe that I actually spent time reading it.

This evening I was innocently reading up on Bonde do Rolê because I have just bought their album, With Lasers. Overall it is an adequate encyclopedia entry. It delivers the facts in a fairly straight manner. But from the middle of nowhere, some way through the article, I was bombarded with this:

Rodrigo Gorky [is] the DJ/producer who, when combined with the powers of MC Marina Ribatski and MC/producer Pedro D’eyrot, create the hellish firestorm of beats and thunderous bass that is…Bonde do Rolê.

Someone has been reading too much music journalism. As if describing something as a “hellish firestorm of beats and thunderous bass” on a website that is meant to be a reasonably reliable source of reasonably impartial information wasn’t bad enough, they go and add an ellipsis to signify mock suspense. Do they think Wikipedia is just one long cheesy film trailer? It is such an irritating sentence. I would understand if somebody wrote it for the NME, but not Wikipedia.

But it is not the fawning that annoys me the most about pop culture articles on Wikipedia. It is a sometimes unbelievably anal focus on inconsequential information. Take this section from the article about Fonejacker.

The end of the show [Fonejacker's Christmas Message] displayed Fonejacker: Coming April 2007 – Don’t Pick Up The Phone.

In March, a teaser trailer started to air on Channel 4 and E4, which consisted of clips of the pilot put together into a thirty second advert, ending with e4.com/fonejacker, which redirected users to the Fonejacker MySpace page. [1]. However, for undisclosed reasons, the show was put on hold, and wasn’t aired in April. After this, a rumour spread that the show would start on June 7, 2007, but this also proved to be incorrect. Whilst fans thought there was no hope for the show, new trailers aired in June which saw the Fonejacker in his own flat performing various calls, and a television tuned into the news reporting “new sightings of the Fonejacker”. The advert ended with the catchphrase Don’t Pick Up The Phone and finished with the same E4 website. This was followed a couple of days after by a newer alternative advert.

This is a paragraph and a bit entirely dedicated to the different dates that the first proper series of Fonejacker was supposed to start. It is really just an incredibly long-winded way of saying, “The first series was delayed by a couple of months.” I mean, really. Big deal!

It’s just topped off by the phrase “fans thought there was no hope for the show”. I have images of some socially inept Fonejacker fan rushing to update Wikipedia with “useful information” about the latest teaser trail or even plain hearsay about possible transmission dates about a television series that he feared for the life of.

Then there are the articles which clunkily add news into an article with absolutely no regard given to the overall flow of the article. The following paragraph appears at the end of a section about the 2007 season in the article about Felipe Massa:

On 24 August 2007, Felipe Massa stated that he is a fan of Fenerbahçe [2] . Massa said: “Zico was idol of my childhood, Roberto Carlos is my best friend. I am a Fenerbahçe fan, because it is just like Brazilian team. I love Turkey, as I won my first championship in Turkey, it has special value for me.”

The whole paragraph is spew-worthy trivia which is placed in a section about Felipe Massa’s 2007 season. I don’t mind the inclusion of information like this, but it should be in a separate ‘Trivia’ section. It is jarring to be reading about Felipe Massa’s on-track events in one sentence and about his footballer pals in the next.

And don’t get me started on the sometimes cringeworthy articles about Boards of Canada. Just check out this one about Old Tunes which reports happenings on a messageboard as though it was as serious a situation as Watergate.

The thing is, though, I can understand why people put such information in Wikipedia pages, and even that there might be demand for such information. I would be interested in this kind of information if it was about a topic that I was really interested in. But it does make some Wikipedia articles look rather ragged and untidy, with a sometimes obsessive focus on inconsequential details.

I know I could edit the articles myself, but it would probably be fruitless. I don’t want to risk upsetting the obsessive Fonejacker fan. Besides, it would probably be reverted back anyway. Plus, I think the information is of value. Just, maybe not on Wikipedia.

Wouldn’t it be good if there was a Fanpedia? A wiki site where people are allowed to be disgustingly obsessed with the minutiae of their hobbies. This could leave Wikipedia to focus on information that has proved to be important over a period of time.

I guess Wikimedia would not be too keen to provide a ‘Fanpedia’ service. I wonder who would actually be prepared to fund one? Then we might find out the real value of this trivial information is not so great after all.

Guardian Unlimited’s new blog, Comment is free, seems to have opened a bit of a can of worms, and once again bloggers are wondering what the hell a blog actually is.

As a starting point, here is an interesting discussion at Europhobia about it all. There are lots of interesting points there.

There have always been those who maintain that the ‘mainstream media’ simply can’t blog; that it goes against the whole idea of blogging, which is to give the little guys a voice. Nosemonkey says that Glenn Reynolds is not a “proper” blogger, even though he made his name by blogging!

Reynolds, as far as I’m aware, makes a packet out of Instapundit. In my eyes, that makes him a good businessman using the blog format as a means of delivering his product, not a blogger.

This reminds me a lot of the recent minor hoo-ha when Ricky Gervais decided to start charging for his massively popular podcast.

“They have not clue on the subject of podcasting. It’s supposed to be FREE. It’s supposed to rival radio. The Idiots. Rick, steve, karl, if your reading this, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE AELIENATED YOURSELFS FROM THE PODCASTING COMMUNITY!!!!’”

(I don’t mean to compare intelligence or writing standards here. Of course, Nosemonkey is much more thoughtful.) I guess you could ask whether Ricky Gervais was even part of the ‘podcasting community’ in the first place, given that he’s not a ‘little guy’.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn. There is the blog (or podcast) format. They are formats in the same way a newspaper or a radio programme is. The difference between the latter two and the former is that it is much easier for a ‘little guy’ to have a blog than it is for him to have a radio programme. But does that mean that ‘big guys’ should be excluded from blogging? I don’t think so.

I broadly welcome MSM attempts to step into the ‘blogosphere’. Of course, if they do it badly, as many do, they risk being ridiculed and, indeed, alienated from the community (I want to stress community; more on that in a minute). But if a ‘big guy’ does blogging well, it can have many advantages. Isn’t that why Tim Ireland tries to get MPs blogging? What is so inherently wrong with a ‘big guy’ blogging? Why should we scare people off just because they’re a ‘big guy’? Isn’t the conversation to be welcomed?

I also don’t like the idea of excluding people from the ‘proper blogging’ club just because they make money out of blogging. What about people like Jason Kottke? Boing Boing looks like it makes a packet, and while it may not have the same approach as a ‘little guy’ personal blogger, I think it adds a lot to the blogosphere. If I was asked to write an article for a newspaper I would do it (infact, I have done it, but it wasn’t published — the bastards!). And I tell you, if I could make money out of blogging, I certainly wouldn’t say no, and you probably wouldn’t either.

I do like some MSM blogs. Not very much, but I do like them. I guess it’s true that if you wanted to read an MSM viewpoint you would just read the normal website. But I like the conversation aspect of the blogs and the MSM can sometimes pull this off. For instance, I think the BBC were very brave to take such a liberal approach to comments on Nick Robinson’s blog.

And this is perhaps the issue with Comment is Free. In the comments of my previous post about Comment is Free, Simstim put his finger right on it.

I’ve yet to see an article author get down and dirty in the comments and there’s a distinct lack of linking going on in the articles as well as in the comments.

The problem with Comment is Free is that it does feel a little bit like The Guardian are hopping on the bandwaggon a bit. It could be a genuine attempt to have a conversation with its readers, but as things stand it’s just the same old commentators with a little comments form at the bottom. A-woo-hoo! (Having said that, it is early days for Comment is Free, and there does seem to be a reasonable amount of discussion in general.)

That brings us onto the community element I mentioned earlier. Above, I metioned the need to distinguish the blog format from ‘little guy’ bloggers. To me, comments are one of the major features of the blog format. But there we get ourselves into such trouble. Blogs generally involve a list of posts displayed in (reverse) chronological order, but this doesn’t differ much from a CMS like that used by, for instance, At Ease, which I wouldn’t call a blog. I have heard some say that RSS feeds are a distinguishing feature of blogs, but that is nonsense because loads of sites, not just blogs, use RSS feeds.

So that, I think, leaves us with one thing to point the finger at: comments. Still no go I’m afraid. Bloggers that do not have a comments facility may be criticised for not allowing discussions on their patch, but is Normblog not a blog? (Norman Geras, being an academic, probably counts as a ‘big guy’ as well — the horror!) Bloggerheads, if my memory serves me well, was quite late in getting a comments facility, but it definitely always was a blog. Infact, Tim Ireland is practically a cheerleader for the whole idea of blogging. Geras and Ireland have always generally been involved in discussions, so what’s the big fuss?

It’s easy to get bogged down in these issues, but it is really an irrelevance. While we may all have our own ideas whenever we visit a website, there is no hard-and-fast formula that makes website x a blog and website y not a blog. But why bother? If somebody is trying to reach out and attempting to have a conversation, it doesn’t matter whether they are doing it on a blog, a plain old website or with smoke signals.

Something else to consider is whether or not bloggers are in a bit of an ivory tower just like the MSM? I don’t mean that bloggers are part of some kind of privileged elite, although I think a lot of the most popular bloggers out there may well have made a name for themselves whether blogging had been invented or not. This is simply because many of them are such great writers and activists, and it’s just that for us, sitting here in the early 21^st century, blogging is the most convenient and efficient way to get your message out.

But I don’t just mean that; I mean that bloggers may be out of touch with the public as a whole. I think because of the nature of blogging — having debates and arguments and so on — you have to be a clear thinker and a good writer in order to be noticed. Bad writers are ignored, and they eventually get bored of being sidelined and disappear. It’s like a survival of the fittest.

But we should also be wary of the idea that there is one massive ‘blogosphere’. Rather, there are several mini-blogospheres. I and others in this mini-blogosphere know of blogs like Europhobia, Chicken Yoghurt and Tim Worstall. But in a parallel mini-blogosphere, doctorgee who writes about train sets will have his own different big-name train set bloggers to look up to. JonnyB was right when he wrote on Comment is Free:

British bloggers write about their cats. And their favourite bands. And the bloke they shagged last night who they’re not really sure about but are secretly desperate to get a call from. And the bad meal that they had in the restaurant down the road. And the horror of supporting Charlton FC. And finding their drunk neighbour crawling around on their roof.

Some of them write about politics and economics and technical IT stuff. I know these get a lot of publicity, being the kind of things that people who write newspapers are interested in, but you really do have to get out to the world at large a bit more.

Being an MSM site, Comment is Free is attracting its fair share of participants who are not part of the ‘blogosphere’. Some are downright offensive about it. I read an article on The Scotsman website about whether or not some regular feature or other should be turned into a blog or a BBC-style ‘have your say’ section. The published responses suggested a collective, resounding no. Ironically, they were having their say. Don’t they see the irony? Ho-hum.

Despite giving the benefit of the doubt to MSM blogs, the main reason I read blogs is because I want to hear opinions and discussion from normal people, little guys. Some people may dislike this. Here’s one from Comment is Free by chpm:

Personally I find blogs to be just more vanity e-publishing. They can be amusing for a bit but I would rather read a well written article in the Guardian or Spectator that presents a coherent set of ideas marshalled into a cogent piece with wit, a beginning, middle and end.

And a rather more direct one posted at Robert Sharp’s blog:

You sad ****. Why don’t bloggers get a fucking live and walk out into the sunshine once in a while? You will never, ever matter one billionth as much as even the least-read newspaper, magazine or least viewed tv programme.

Leaving an angry comment on a blog is a strange way of showing how little blogs matter. Never mind though. I don’t understand what some people find so offensive about the idea of people expressing themselves or having a discussion. And I’ve never really bought the vanity publishing idea. Maybe it’s true up to a point, but there are far easier ways to be vain. Have they never seen MySpace?!

I do think that sometimes there is an awful lot of hyperbole about the potential of blogs though. There is the question of whether or not bloggers can make a difference in the long run. It’s usually framed around the idea that bloggers should somehow be claiming scalps left, right and centre. I’ve made my views on that clear a few times (in short: I don’t care). It is a slightly annoying aspect of the whole debate about blogging.

Tied in with this is the idea of citizen journalism. It would be a bare-faced lie to say that all bloggers are citizen journalists. I’ve never gone out and investigated anything in my life! Nevertheless, citizen journalists do exist. Some think that this means that bloggers are replacing newspapers. This is just nonsense.

The fact is that there is a two-way relationship between the MSM and bloggers. It is the relationship that is important, not whether or not bloggers are usurping the MSM. We see this relationship in the way that some newspapers are reaching out to bloggers, for instance with The Guardian regularly publishing a selection of thoughts from the blogosphere. There are also the instances when BBC News or Sky News ask viewers to send in photographs and videos of a big news event — we saw this with the London bombings. Bloggers may rely on the MSM for its stories. But by the same token, the MSM is increasingly relying on ‘little people’ for its stories.

Today Oliver Kamm wrote about blogging and how superior the MSM is (now that he is part of the MSM, of course). Longrider sums it up for me:

While it’s true that comment on blogs is driven by stories found in the mainstream media; as, indeed, this is; it provides a platform for two way comment that a newspaper lacks…

The advantage of blogging is that it enables people who would not normally gather together to meet virtually and exchange ideas and if necessary, tactics. Liberty Central is embryonic, but stems from this idea. Whether it will change the face of British politics is moot…

For me, just the fact that blogging gives people — any people — a corner on the internet where they can communicate with each other and express their views is enough for it to be a great thing. Sometimes I think it’s absurd that the views of somebody like me — a fairly mundane 19-year-old, generally lacking in life experience — should have any kind of importance whatsoever. But on the other hand, why shouldn’t I have a voice? The complete ordinariness of me surely makes me all the more qualified to have my say?

Along with wikis, it’s the realisation of the idea of the read / write web. Last year Mark Lawson sneered about blogging to Tim Berners-Lee, who replied that it was almost exactly what he had in mind when he invented the world wide web!

In short, this is my bit of the web, so why shouldn’t I have it? That’s why I’m constantly tinkering with the design and format of this blog — because it’s my little patch and I want to experiment on it and so on and so forth. Hence the recent botched attempt to shove everything I’ve ever written into six categories. (I ditched that idea because it almost made it look like I was saying I was an expert in those subjects, which I’m not at all.) And so on.

I’m not sure which ‘mini-blogosphere’ I fit into (although I probably read and engage with politics blogs the most). I don’t know why people visit this blog. And my visitor figures aren’t astronomically high, I will never have the influence of newspapers, and therefore I probably won’t make much of a difference to the world by having a blog. But as far as I’m concerned, all of that doesn’t matter. Bloggers are merely expressing themselves — and what is wrong with that?

What I can say with certainty is that reading other people’s blogs has opened — and sharpened — my mind tremendously. This window into other people’s lives — reading about their opinions and the oddities in their lives and hearing them explain them — has educated me a lot, and I am grateful to all the bloggers who let me do that. It might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I think it’s great.

What is my overall point then? I think that we should all stop fussing over what is or is not a blog. Whether a blog has a comments facility or not; whether the viewpoints come from ‘mainstream’ ‘big guys’ or ‘little guys’ (maybe this is something I should have followed before I started writing this dinosaur of a post!) — we should just sit back and enjoy the discussion. Because that’s what it’s all about, right?

I updated this post (tidying up and expanding arguments) on 19/03/2006.