I’m not in the top 300 (though I might have made the top 500, “you’ll have to buy the book to find out”, he says. The book costs a tenner).

More importantly, Iain is making one or two disclaimers as to the subjectivity of the list, but still holds it up as an example of how much healthier the Right-wing blogosphere is than the Left.

That is a correct criticism, but at the same time there needs to be some way of saying, “hey, I like/agree with/enjoy this more than I like/agreewith/enjoy this”

But only if we recognise that this is subjective and does not reflect intrinsic worth.

What of course would be slightly less subjective criteria would be rankings based upon the number of comments, and the seriousness of debate in those comments, or on the number of regular readers, etc.

That a “respectable” pundit (especially a right-wing one) would try to detract or distract from the discussions of the masses is almost trivial. We get an elitist polemic like this one in CiS or something about once a month; Iain’s list is a much more polite, more subtle, and at this point probably more effective example.

The idea of a blogosphere is now too prevelant to be rubbished away with snobbery, so now we have the next stage: (attempted) co-option. But I think Iain’s approach (blogs are great; believe me, I’m the expert) may be self-defeating; as the more people come round to the idea of using on the blogosphere as a source of information the less they will come to respect the idea of elite pundits and self-appointed experts. I hope so, at least; misrepresenting the people to themselves is a dirty, but timeless, trick, and deserves to fail.

Your own alternative list was interesting, I’ll be investigating some of the names on there as and when time allows. I think to an extent the idea of rankings and league tables is incompatible with Leftism, and correspondingly it’s interesting that you include plenty of disclaimers about both the subjectivity of the list and the arbitrariness of the ordering, while Iain gets straight into what we can “deduce” from the position and nature of the “highest new entries”.

Yes it is not without importnace, becasue the conclusion that Iain, as a celebrated pundit, promotes is that there is little left of centre blogging.

Which reinforces the idea that there is an ideological consensus in society as a whole that coincides with the political consensus in the Westminster village.

i don’t really care that my blog ( http://www.socialistunity.com/ ) is not in Iain’s list, or that Lenin’s isn’t.

But I suspect that as the SU blog gets around 1700 unique visitors a day, and Lenin’s Tomb even more, that we are actually more representative of left blogging than some of the others who do make his list.