Blinking Blogs

Labour MP Austin Mitchell has a blog (he calls it a WeBLOG). Well, it’s a bit like a blog, but it doesn’t allow comments so it’s not really a blog. And it has a really horrible blink effect on some of the text that gives you a headache if you look at it for more than thirty seconds. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want you to read it. Thank goodness for RSS readers.

Anyway, today on his “blog” he writes about blogs. I’ll quote the whole thing so you don’t have to suffer the blinking.

Dont join the chorus of praise for the Blogsphere as a new dimension of democracy which will liberate the people from dependence on old media.

Crap. Blogging is a forum for gossip, character assassination, sensation and expose. It is inherently anti-government and conservative because prejudice is easier to get over than serious explanation. Just like Talk Radio.

So the strongest practitioners are Republicans like Drudge or rank Tories like Ian Dale and Guido Fawkes, leaving this as the only voice of sense, semi-socialism, freedom, truth and justice.

Even so its an intellectual feast compared to You Tube, My Space and the rest. Theyre the ten second sound bites, playgrounds for manipulation, synthetic situations, thespians and gimmicks. Leave them to Cameron and Blair and dont rot your brain.

Let’s overlook the slight weirdness of using a blog to say that blogs are crap. And let’s forgive the bigheadedness that leads him to claim that his site is the only source of sanity of the web. It’s far more interesting that he has picked up on bloggers like Ian [sic] Dale and Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) and is holding them up as representative examples of political blogs.

This is exactly the problem that Tim Ireland has been talking about a lot recently. Because people like Dale and Staines shout loudly, they are seen by many people as the best examples of British political blogs. It’s very likely that they are two of the most widely read British political blogs. And people will assume a) that all political blogs are like that and b) that all political blogs have to be like that.

Dale and Staines are not good examples of political blogs. It’s worrying that a politician like Mitchell thinks that they are. There are civilised British political blogs. There are blogs where intelligent discussion is encouraged. There are blogs where dissenting comments aren’t just deleted. Take a look at my blogroll and you’ll see links to some of them.

It’s just a shame that this civilised side of the blogosphere has been eclipsed by people like Dale and Staines.

Update: It seems that Internet Explorer ignores the blink effect. So if you really must read Austin Mitchell’s blog then you should probably use IE. And I never thought I’d be recommending IE for anything.