Bloggers relax!
I went along to the VoxPolitics blogging discussion at Parliament yesterday, 'Can blogs change politics?'. First one must congratulate the VoxPolitics team for an excellent turnout and diverse range of speakers, including Britain's first blogging MP, Tom Watson (who helped to organise the event).Whether the meeting actually answered the above question is less clear-cut. Certainly there seemed many who were afflicted by a new, virulent form of dot-com mania, except instead of it being the end of big business/bookshops/petshops etc as we know it, it was the end of politics. From now on everything will take place on blogs.
By far the most sensible comment on this came near the end, when it was pointed out that the moment blogs get popular they basically lose their interaction between blogger and readers. Some popular American sites which have comments often have over 150 within a few minutes - this makes it utterly unreadable, and yet 150 is not really that many in societies of millions of people.
All in all there was far too much taking blogs seriously. Clearly people who are prepared to turn up to the House of Commons to discuss political blogging on an incredibly hot July evening are not representative of the population at large, or even the blog community, and shouldn't be seen as such. Most people do them because they are fun, not because they are going to change the world (David Carr made this point).
A few random observations.
Why do people come to a meeting and then connect their laptops to a wifi connection and start surfing the internet/talking on ICQ etc? It just seems rude.
Blogs -- almost all -- are free of charge to consume. It's therefore difficult to make meaningful observations about their popularity compared with other media.
There is far too much attributing of the causes of political events to blogging. Howell Raines would have resigned if there were no blogs, ditto Trent Lott.
Nick Barlow exists, seems very pleasant and doesn't take blogging too seriously. However he does work very strange hours, and AFTER he's sat in a hot committee room for two hours. The man is destined to go far.
posted by Matthew @ 7/15/2003 09:13:00 AM
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