So, where are those 'elusive' Scottish bloggers, as discussed on Radio Scotland a few days ago (audio link may be dodgy, but still currently accessible via the Scotland page on the BBC website). It echoes a question I've posed before: where is the Scottish Guido? Why are the top Scottish political blogs nowhere near as big or beefy as their English/British counterparts?
We'll skip lightly over the assertion, in the linked audio report, that there are only 'a couple of dozen' political blogs north of the border and simply note that Tim Reid's search clearly wasn't that exhaustive - when he eventually 'finds' one, he bemoans the fact that it's actually written by an Englishman who doesn't even live in Scotland any more - step forward Will Patterson's J Arthur MacNumpty, raising the terrifying possibility that Reid searched for Scottish blogs by typing "Scottish McBlogs" into Google - but, in their interview, Will immediately undermines his slightly facile generalisation by pointing him towards Doctorvee and Curious Hamster.
It is true, though, that Scottish blogs rather lag behind when compared to the uberbloggers from south of the border, men like Fawkes and Iain Dale, Conservative Home or even Portuguese layabout Tim Worstall - and of course DK, who is now officially English once more. The gap is noticeable not just in terms of reader numbers - thousands, even tens of thousands, per day as against the few hundred that the most popular Scottish blogs can muster at best - but also in terms of 'influence', if we can call it that (not that repeatedly calling Jack McConnell a pug-faced moron is going to swing any marginal seats at the Holyrood elections).
It's certainly not an issue of quality. Leave to one side the asinine, ill-informed dribblings of my own blog; there are plenty of good bloggers, from the aforementioned Doctorvee, MacNumpty and Hamster through the venerable Freedom and Whisky (can I call you venerable, David?) to blogs like Shuggy's, Cassilis or my good friend the Reactionary Snob (whose daughter is no longer returning my calls, put in a good word will you old chap?). Take a look at the weekly Scottish Blogging Roundup and make up your own mind. (Of course, in order properly to refute Reid's assertion, I'd have to list more than two dozen Scottish blogs, but that strikes me as silly).
The blogs mentioned are just a selection, but they run the gamut from left to right, SNP to unionist, thoughtful and considered to, ahem, vulgar and rude. You may hate any given blog on that list, but taken as a whole, for a small country, it ain't a bad start.
Problems, then? Well, the focus of some blogs is still on Westminster rather than on Holyrood, so a lot of Scottish bloggers are not writing on specifically "Scottish" stories a lot of the time. (A quick trawl through some of the aforementioned blogs suggests that this varies from writer to writer, but on few of them are Scottish stories a majority topic, SPN being an obvious exception). Of course, conversely, to write on Scottish politics may immediately turn non-Scottish readers off and cause them to reach for the "back" button on their browser. So we're caught both ways.
There's a chicken-and-egg problem going on here, too. If you look at the big national newspapers, you see that many of them have embraced the blogging medium to some extent or another. The Times and The Guardian have set up Comment Central and Comment is Free respectively, and both interact with and discuss blogs frequently. The Telegraph and the Indy clearly keep one eye on blogs and feature bloggers from time to time. But, north of the border? Nothing. If you read the Sunday Times online then, buried deep within the Scotland section, you will find a "best of the blogs" feature which normally features two or three excerpts from Scottish blogs (last week included, er, Councillor Terry Kelly), but that's pretty much that. Bloggers affect to be disdainful of MSM recognition but the fact is that to reach a wider audience and to start to have any kind of influence, blogs have to make a splash on the wider media consciousness, and that just isn't happening at the moment.
To those who say that it's no bad thing if Scottish blogs are ignored, because Scottish bloggers, like bloggers everywhere, are just irritable guys in anoraks sounding off about stuff they don't understand, I'd say, fair enough - but go and read Daily Kos. Not to slander a fellow Greek, but those clowns nearly unseated a US Senator and, if you think I'm unhinged, mix yourself a drink and wallow in the comments section to one of Markos Moulitsas' posts. (In the US, of course, bloggers with Greek pseudonyms are written in to The West Wing, though they get actors to play them, because of course we're not nearly so nerdy in real life.) Not knowing what the hell you are talking about never stopped a journalist, did it? I would say there is intrinsic value in knowing what ordinary people think about political issues, even if blogs contain only, by definition, a self-selected sample of such views.
There's one other point I'd mention. Certain blogs, this one included, are written from a broadly right-of-centre, or libertarian, point of view. Looking at Scottish politics, the predominant emotion those types of bloggers feel is one of despair. So what if the Executive is SNP/Liberal after May, as opposed to Labour/Liberal? If, like me, you believe that your country is being held down by a deadening left-of-centre statist consensus, it matters little who's got his boot on your throat.
And that consensus is not going to be broken any time soon - not as long as Scottish politicians can announce spending rises safe in the knowledge that they don't have to go cap in hand to the voters to justify them - and there are few signs that it's going to be broken by the Scottish Tories, even if only through lack of numbers. I know a few Scottish Tories read my own blog, and I hope some are reading this; I've been critical of them in the past on any number of counts, but the truth is that many of them do 'get' this; it's simply one hell of a big ask for a party polling at 11 or 12 percent to overturn a half-century of backward thinking, particularly when no-one's listening.
So, after a while, blogging about Scottish politics eventually acquires a kind of stuck-record quality - "why our elected leaders are bastards vol. 355" is dull enough when applied to Blair and Co. but at least there is the possibility of change, however distant. Here? Not so much. That, though, is why blogs like this are even more valuable and important here than elsewhere - proof that there's life outside Holyrood's expensive walls, political discussions going on that aren't to be found on the pages of Scotland's broadsheets, and views that aren't fully reflected in the national debate, such as it is.
We'll skip lightly over the assertion, in the linked audio report, that there are only 'a couple of dozen' political blogs north of the border and simply note that Tim Reid's search clearly wasn't that exhaustive - when he eventually 'finds' one, he bemoans the fact that it's actually written by an Englishman who doesn't even live in Scotland any more - step forward Will Patterson's J Arthur MacNumpty, raising the terrifying possibility that Reid searched for Scottish blogs by typing "Scottish McBlogs" into Google - but, in their interview, Will immediately undermines his slightly facile generalisation by pointing him towards Doctorvee and Curious Hamster.
It is true, though, that Scottish blogs rather lag behind when compared to the uberbloggers from south of the border, men like Fawkes and Iain Dale, Conservative Home or even Portuguese layabout Tim Worstall - and of course DK, who is now officially English once more. The gap is noticeable not just in terms of reader numbers - thousands, even tens of thousands, per day as against the few hundred that the most popular Scottish blogs can muster at best - but also in terms of 'influence', if we can call it that (not that repeatedly calling Jack McConnell a pug-faced moron is going to swing any marginal seats at the Holyrood elections).
It's certainly not an issue of quality. Leave to one side the asinine, ill-informed dribblings of my own blog; there are plenty of good bloggers, from the aforementioned Doctorvee, MacNumpty and Hamster through the venerable Freedom and Whisky (can I call you venerable, David?) to blogs like Shuggy's, Cassilis or my good friend the Reactionary Snob (whose daughter is no longer returning my calls, put in a good word will you old chap?). Take a look at the weekly Scottish Blogging Roundup and make up your own mind. (Of course, in order properly to refute Reid's assertion, I'd have to list more than two dozen Scottish blogs, but that strikes me as silly).
The blogs mentioned are just a selection, but they run the gamut from left to right, SNP to unionist, thoughtful and considered to, ahem, vulgar and rude. You may hate any given blog on that list, but taken as a whole, for a small country, it ain't a bad start.
Problems, then? Well, the focus of some blogs is still on Westminster rather than on Holyrood, so a lot of Scottish bloggers are not writing on specifically "Scottish" stories a lot of the time. (A quick trawl through some of the aforementioned blogs suggests that this varies from writer to writer, but on few of them are Scottish stories a majority topic, SPN being an obvious exception). Of course, conversely, to write on Scottish politics may immediately turn non-Scottish readers off and cause them to reach for the "back" button on their browser. So we're caught both ways.
There's a chicken-and-egg problem going on here, too. If you look at the big national newspapers, you see that many of them have embraced the blogging medium to some extent or another. The Times and The Guardian have set up Comment Central and Comment is Free respectively, and both interact with and discuss blogs frequently. The Telegraph and the Indy clearly keep one eye on blogs and feature bloggers from time to time. But, north of the border? Nothing. If you read the Sunday Times online then, buried deep within the Scotland section, you will find a "best of the blogs" feature which normally features two or three excerpts from Scottish blogs (last week included, er, Councillor Terry Kelly), but that's pretty much that. Bloggers affect to be disdainful of MSM recognition but the fact is that to reach a wider audience and to start to have any kind of influence, blogs have to make a splash on the wider media consciousness, and that just isn't happening at the moment.
To those who say that it's no bad thing if Scottish blogs are ignored, because Scottish bloggers, like bloggers everywhere, are just irritable guys in anoraks sounding off about stuff they don't understand, I'd say, fair enough - but go and read Daily Kos. Not to slander a fellow Greek, but those clowns nearly unseated a US Senator and, if you think I'm unhinged, mix yourself a drink and wallow in the comments section to one of Markos Moulitsas' posts. (In the US, of course, bloggers with Greek pseudonyms are written in to The West Wing, though they get actors to play them, because of course we're not nearly so nerdy in real life.) Not knowing what the hell you are talking about never stopped a journalist, did it? I would say there is intrinsic value in knowing what ordinary people think about political issues, even if blogs contain only, by definition, a self-selected sample of such views.
There's one other point I'd mention. Certain blogs, this one included, are written from a broadly right-of-centre, or libertarian, point of view. Looking at Scottish politics, the predominant emotion those types of bloggers feel is one of despair. So what if the Executive is SNP/Liberal after May, as opposed to Labour/Liberal? If, like me, you believe that your country is being held down by a deadening left-of-centre statist consensus, it matters little who's got his boot on your throat.
And that consensus is not going to be broken any time soon - not as long as Scottish politicians can announce spending rises safe in the knowledge that they don't have to go cap in hand to the voters to justify them - and there are few signs that it's going to be broken by the Scottish Tories, even if only through lack of numbers. I know a few Scottish Tories read my own blog, and I hope some are reading this; I've been critical of them in the past on any number of counts, but the truth is that many of them do 'get' this; it's simply one hell of a big ask for a party polling at 11 or 12 percent to overturn a half-century of backward thinking, particularly when no-one's listening.
So, after a while, blogging about Scottish politics eventually acquires a kind of stuck-record quality - "why our elected leaders are bastards vol. 355" is dull enough when applied to Blair and Co. but at least there is the possibility of change, however distant. Here? Not so much. That, though, is why blogs like this are even more valuable and important here than elsewhere - proof that there's life outside Holyrood's expensive walls, political discussions going on that aren't to be found on the pages of Scotland's broadsheets, and views that aren't fully reflected in the national debate, such as it is.
