I like blogging, you’ll not be too surprised to note, a bit less now I get to have regular political discussions in the real world, but still. You can find people online who you trust to find you interesting and relevant stories, allowing you to at least partially opt out of the propaganda model and create your own set of filters. You can also have some really interesting discussions, and while it’s important to always remember that the real action is out in meatspace (and sitting at your computer rarely counts as activism) the online democratisation of the media is an incredibly healthy thing.
Unfortunately, the “respectable” face of blogging, for many people, is the likes of this guy:

That was Paul “Guido Fawkes” Staines, a Tory idiot who for a period was regularly brought out by the mainstream media whenever they wanted to show you what a “blogger” was. Clearly, you weren’t expected to come to a particularly complimentary definition. Another example of the “establishment blogger” phenomenon is Iain Dale, another Tory and a failed parliamentary candidate at that.

Although his commentary is, if anything, even more inane than that of Staines, much of it is aimed not just at politics but at what Dale sees as the political blogosphere. Longtime readers of the Complex will remember when he put me onto his list, under the possibly libellious category of “Labour Party blogs“. When I laid into his dodgy methodology Iain replied that it was just “a bit of fun” - but that didn’t stop him from publishing it in a book and prattling on about the conclusions one could draw about the state of blogging.

The emergence of self-appointed “blogging experts” like Dale, who try to represent and co-opt the emerging democratic media, to marginalise all that falls outside the self-obsessed bubble of establishment politics, and to carve out a priveleged position for themselves as the intermediary between the bloggers and the mainstream, should come as no surprise. But nor should it come as a surprise that this “blogging aristocracy” has stirred up a lot of resentment. And so, when it transpires that both Dale and Staines have been systematically and spectacularly lying about the number of visitors they receive so as to better wave their willies at the blogging lesser-endowed, that the stratoblogosphere they inhabit is but a figment of their mendacious imaginations, it’s all immensely satisfying.