Bob Piper has been a Labour councillor for the Abbey
Ward in Sandwell, West Midlands, for eight years. He is a lifelong supporter of Aston Villa Football Club and a follower of Yorkshire County Cricket Club.
The views expressed here are mine in a personal capacity, not those of the Labour Party, Sandwell MBC, Aston Villa or Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Get it! Mine... just mine!
In a recent piece Iain Dale raised an interesting issue about the size of blog audiences. He pointed out that unlike the right, the left doesn't have any 'mass circulation' blogs.
Iain is right, of course. The biggest blogs in terms of readership are certainly right-wing, appear to be very professional (well financed, some may say with a glint in their eye) and although occasionally serious, for instance ConservativeHome, Political Betting (actually I understand Smithson is a Liberal, but I suppose that qualifies as right wing) and Tim Worstall who manages to combine the trivial with the serious rather well, the likes of the Tory big hitters like Iain Dale, Dizzy and Staines rely more on gossip and trivia than any serious content.
That is not intended to be a slight. Political gossip and trivia has its place and lampooning our leaders is a long and honourable tradition. Also, unlike serious, in depth analysis, I suspect it is better equipped for the internet. In the same way that people reading newspapers on the London Underground or the No.51 bus in the morning want something short, snappy, amusing and light to read on their way to work, so they pick up a tabloid, blog readers snatching 15 minutes over their lunchbreak at work would, I suggest, be more likely to surf gossip bloggers rather than spend the entire quarter of an hour ploughing through one of Unity's dissections of Michael Ashcroft's financial influence over the Conservative Party.
Again, I'm not having a go at anyone in particular here, just trying to explain some of the comparisons that Iain puts forward. The left blogs that Iain doesn't include in his list (although the Liberal Democrat schizophrenia comes out again here as Iain thinks they are on the left) that appear regularly and are well worth reading, tend not to be salacious gossip or political point scoring but what you might call 'opinion columns'. Amongst others they include Skipper, Paul Linford, Harry Barnes, Chicken Yoghurt, Mike Ion, Andy Howell and there are a number of others you can find amongst the 'left' bloggers in the left hand margin. The flavour of these blogs tends to be more Guardian/New Statesman than Dialy Mail or The Sun, and as Iain rightly notes, there readership no-where near matches the right-wing tabloid bloggers.
Iain Dale's final point appears to be that bloggers on the left may get dispirited if they don't get 1,000 plus readers a day and that they shouldn't. As he says, a good blog is a good blog... if it is read by fifty people a day who enjoy it, and the writer gets some enjoyment out of writing it, good, stick at it. I rather take the line Cassilis took when he relaunched his blog. It isn't about pushing up the hit count, it is about interacting with your audience, no matter how large or small that may be, and testing your ideas against others. Also, its about pointing people in the direction of things they may have missed elsewhere and might find enjoyable, interesting, stimulating or provocative.
So, overall, Iain, I suspect the right-wing bloggers you name, and the left-wing ones I'm talking about, are in the same market, and there is an overspill in the audience... and as long as they are comfortable in their own skin, size doesn't really matter.
There are only two types of blog: good ones and bad ones. As an 'underground' phenomenon blogs taking the opposition stance will always have the upper hand, but ultimately good content will win out regardless of the politics. I enjoy reading blogs both from the left and right, the only criteria being whether it is interesting or not.
As a rule though blogs of all colours should be kept short and sweet. For some reason more left-leaning blogs lean into waffle than do right-leaning ones. Again I think this may be a result of not having the 'attack mode' that results from being in opposition. I don't know.
Anyway, this blog is one of the good type. Keep it up Bob.
newmania said:
March 22, 2008 11:55 AM | permalink
Blogging was obviously going to suit the right which believes in the individual whereas the left likes everything to go through eight well funded committees before you actually say anything .I see the fact the left are so absent as a class issue. The group who have been out of power for the last ten years are above all the lower middleclass. Those above , Cameron you might say , and Blair and Harman etc. ally with the 'poor' to remove their money and by acts of cultural elitism also their voice .
The chief organ of this cultural attack has been the states funded media the BBC still an overwhelming behemoth but these discordant voices were airbrushed out of almost all pubic discourse. This became dominated by the so called progressive agenda of victims , sensitivities and mangerialist contempt for those they see as their inferiors . These Kulak 'inferiors' however, , are often as well educated and as articulate as their betters .It was an unstable dam to build and the rage pouring from its breech has visibly shocked the BBC now belatedly apologising in its commissioning. Too late I fear. The working classes still lack the confidence to throw of the intellectual and moral knots the patrician establishment have tied them in but I think it will come and the expulsion of Labour from all but the imperceptive in England is a slow electoral fact often not mentioned
I can answer you funding point easily enough with reference to the New Statesman , Compass , Labour Home The Guardian and the BBC. In fact as almost all Conservatives are busy working its amazing that we have the predominance that we enjoy .Its not easy providing for a family as well as four or five socialists filling in forms. It left me no time for doing my blog.
Where do Labour go from here Bob ? I think they have to be able to say the words tax cut and mean it before they will even get a hearing . The Conservative brand is still weak and Brown was a gift , he is so left Cameron can talk about stopping things getting worse on tax and control and deliver the entire right of centre vote without having to chuck a single public sector gaping beaked cuckoo out of the nest.Yet. !
Perhaps its time for a new name ? Middle-aged Labour ?
Iain - yes, I think the point is that I do agree with most of what you wrote. However, I still think you were trying to disparage some left bloggers by insinuating they were uninteresting, and I don't agree with you on that. On the funding... just teasing.
Troll - ta!
Newmania, do you ever read the posts before commenting on them? I mean, I don't mind too much if it helps you relieve your tension, but you might want to consider masturbation.
I was commenting on the fact that there are far more right wing blogs than left wing amd far more readers of them. As this was the subject of your post I can only assume you did not read my comment.Fine, but I could do without a level of remark freely available from every piss caked medicant in a shoe shop entrance.
A mass-circulation blog; isn't that a bit like the world's biggest microchip, or an area-effect scalpel, or laser-guided napalm?
The left is only absent if you assume the blogosphere started in 2006. Ah...Iain Dale...ah. Now I get it.
newmania said:
March 22, 2008 10:44 PM | permalink
Donkey eh ? Well it has an Easter resonance I suppose so out of Christian charity I shall assume your dim witted truculence springs from failing your eleven plus or something.
Oh Lord have mercy on the residents of Sandwell and grant them the fortitude to bear the imposition of a childish egomaniac so terrified of anyone cleverer than his that it renders him bestial as the donkey of the field
Tim Worstall isn't right wing: he'd be joining the most awkward of your awkward squad in the "no" lobby on 42 days detention, the Iraq War, ID cards, and countless other issues. Being pro-freedom isn't a left or right thing: it's a consistent political philosophy all of its own. It means rubbing shoulders with the Right" on fiscal matters, and it means rubbing shoulders with the Left on social matters (except where the Left has gone all authoritarian on us; it must be gut-wrenching for Chris Mullins to watch the antics of the Home Office over the last ten years).
Bob, for your left/right distinction, what definitions are you using? Because anything that puts the Lib Dems on the right is a little weird by any that I've ever read.
A party that contains open socialists, followers of JS Mill and is committed to reforming the political system fits into three separate definitions of 'left'. Which one are you using?
Apart from that? I agree with you. Weird, I know, but stranger things have happened.
Well gossip,and tittle tattle are what it says on the blog's tin. Given I set out to be populist, clearly within my own parameters the blog has been a success.
Even my worst enemies would not dispute that I do news as well as gossip, some of it front-page making news. Not as often as I would like, but it is part of the reason the hit-count is so high.
My view is: no audience - no influence. So if you have an agenda to further, you need to win an audience. In my case it also helps get stories. That it is known that I can break a story means I get more stories put my way. Thus a virtuous circle has developed, more sources come to me because of the history of stories migrating from the blog to the mainstream media.
As an aside, it seems to me that about two years ago the political blogosphere was united in anti-Blairism from left to right. We knocked each other on the issues of course, fisked and even occasionally flamed. Something happened which I think is a bit of a dead end. It became bogged down in blogwars. A complete waste of time and energy.
There is an element of truth about the waffle factor when it comes to left blogs. I know, I'm guilty of it 90% of the time. But for most on the left blogging is mostly about critiquing the prevailing order of things, and that often means making serious (and long!) arguments.
But I also think there is some truth to the oppositional argument too. If blogs were about in the Thatcher and Major years I'm pretty sure it would have been left blogs ruling the roost. There's only one way of finding that out and that's by changing government, but that's no reason to vote Tory!
So how about a plug for a hard left blog, eh????????? I was no 33 in Iain Dale's top 100 and see no link......still getting ( on a good day) 200 hita.....
This is something which has surprised me greatly during the time I've been blogging. My blog is read by several 'right wing' bloggers that I can think of, but the only 'left' reader (Tory Troll) has been quite recent. I had thought that with my subject matter the blog should be of interest to the left, but it seems only the right are reading, with I suspect a view to reforming the benefits system in a viable manner. It could however be something to do with the vast majority of 'left' blogs being so dull.
Bendy Girl
A strange sort of logic, if you don't mind me saying. They are not visiting your site because, errm, their sites are dull. Perhaps you should look closer to home for the reason?
Personally I would have thought using the word 'scum' in the title would automatically attract the right wing.
My apologies, I should have clarified the separate issues in my comment. The first being that I had overall been somewhat surprised by the make up of those who read my blog.
The second, unconnected to the first, is that perhaps the readership of blogs with a left wing bias is lower because overall (IMO) they are 'dull' in comparison to the writing styles of the more right wing bloggers.
As for your observations about my blog, it is difficult to keep a blog about life lived on benefits interesting, but so far I've had only positive feedback and requests to keep posting on similar issues. Dull is not a word I've seen used to describe anything I've written.
Using the word scum in the blog title was deliberate. It is supposed to be both ironic and a comment on the way it feels to have to rely on benefits in this current climate.
Bendy Girl - I didn't say your blog was dull, I've never read it, I was merely commenting that if you felt 'left' bloggers were not reading it (although I have no idea how anyone would measure that) then perhaps they thought it was.
I'm all for a bit of tittle tattle here and there. But Iain simply doesn't recognise the importance of the Guardian to us lefties.
I rather like a bit a serious thought occasionally. I'm just better at long paragraphs than I am at pithy jokes.
But remember Dal. US lefties will go to the wall for the Manchester Guardian. (I suppose it will have to be the Kings Cross Guardian soon - they'd be better off in Sandwell !!!)
March 22, 2008 10:47 AM | permalink
I think what you are saying is that we agree!
One or two points. It's not me who considers the LibDems centre left - they do themselves.
Chicken Yoghurt and Mike Ion not political point scoring? LOL.
And just for the record, my blog is financed by no one - just me. I do get advertising income, but that's it. .Just thought you'd like to know!