Sorry about the blogging hiatus, been busy over the past couple of weeks...
Firstly can I say that the news about the closure of both Planet Politics and the Will Patterson Notebook is not really welcome news in the Macbloggosphere. To lose two insightful and interesting bloggers is a sad loss to the Macbloggosphere.
Secondly, both of those blogs touched on the Total Politics annual poll (which I had missed). I wasn't expecting an appearance for this blog in the list (I think my misbehaving hard drive put paid to that!). Even so, a couple of the results were slightly perplexing, and the whole polling process seems like, ah what's the phrase... a quick and dirty exercise. The culling of the Scottish list to 25 (from 50 last year) also seems unsatisfactory considering the "cottage industry" nature of the Macbloggosphere. Still, that shouldn't detract from the sucesses of the MacBlogosphere,hearty congratulations to those at Better Nation towers for making the top ten on the Left Wing blogs list.
All in all, an unsatisfactory couple of days for the Macblogosphere.
4 comments:
Thanks for the kind remarks, Allan.
Yes, the TP awards aren't the be all and end all - for example, clearly blogs like our own, which aren't partisan in tone, suffer from the party-dominated voting - but on the other hand even appearing in the list at all provides a bit of motivation and recognition!!
The problem at the bottom end of the poll in particular is that there are probably only a very small number of votes in play, thus the positions can be very volatile.
Good makeover, by the way - I much prefer this comment system, which is the stanard blogger one rather than the other type which often I can't seem to use under my Blogger registered name.
Thanks for the comment Stuart. I had meant to respond to your previous comment but camping and other things got in the way...
I agree with what you say about the poll, my comment about quick and dirty was mostly about the blink and you'll miss it polling period - was it a month last year (mid July to mid August)? But overall I thought it was a bit rushed. I think blogs like ours also get squeezed out by the mainstream media's online prescence. If you look at the lists, there are lots of newspaper/television Journalists with blog's getting into these lists.
Indeed, and it wouldn't be so bad if they were proper blogs rather than just their MSM articles pasted onto a blogger platform, which seems to defeat the purpose of the whole thing.
But I suppose then they can appear on Newsnicht and call themselves bloggers - a la Gerry Hassan - and thus appear all contemporary rather than a bit behind the curve.
Er, hello?
Hi Allan,
Discovered your blog today. I like it - what you have to say and the layout. I'll add you to my blogroll.
Gavin
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