Blogging could be light this weekend

My weekend is crammed full of all manner of jollities which may preclude time and space for blogging. I shall of course update as and when I can. My weekend starts tonight with a politicalbetting.com party, which should be hugely enjoyable.

Lack of posting

I have numerous excuses for my near two-week lack of posting. The principal one is simply a lack of anything I wanted to say. Secondly my brain has been melted by work and concentrating on reciprocal exchange rates for work. Aargh. Hopefully things are getting back to normal and service shall resume.

Rather concerned with my popular search terms

Most of my blog articles recently have been reached by searches for BNP or their local candidate names. I am somewhat concerned by this.

Someones site isn’t secure….

Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader has had her blog hacked and some changes made. I’m not sure if Harriet will see the funny side though.

 

 hattip: Guido

No Blog due to Dentistry

Sorry no proper posts today, had a tooth out and I’m not feeling up to it! Bad excuse but hey!

Iain Dale is wrong!

This is not about what you think it is! Iain Dale has a post on his blog suggesting that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would both be considered Conservatives in the UK. I disagree. Of course modern politics is very difficult to work out as there is a bunching effect in the political centre. I would argue that the centre ground is not a static construct, it consists of the portion of the political spectrum that most people occupy at a given time. This shifts over time and the sensible politician needs to be in the place that the majority are. If you don’t meet people where they are, they wont move to where you are! Now the reason that Iain Dale is wrong about Clinton and Obama is this, all politicians want to shift the centre ground over time. Margaret Thatcher moved the centre ground over her period of office gradually to the right. Blair and Brown from 1997 moved on to the centre ground as Thatcher/Major had moved it and gradually tugged it leftwards. So how you define a politician is where do they want to tug the centre ground?

In terms of the UK we have three principle political parties, Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Democrats. For simplicity Labour tend to want to tug the centre leftwards, Conservatives want to tug the centre rightwards, and Liberal Democrats seem to want to leave the centre in the centre. So what about Barack and Hillary where do I say they would fit, well it is clear that they are both highly attuned to the political centre as they find it, but where do they want to move it? I would argue that both of them in different ways want to shift the centre marginally leftwards. Barack Obama seems to want to go further than Hillary so I would define them as both fitting into the Labour party but Barack Obama is more of a Brownite and Hillary is more of a Blairite.

Political Betting Party

Just returned from the Politicalbetting.com party in London, had to roust my mother for taxi duty (oh the shame) but got involved in a rather interesting set of discussions with some notable posters and just lost track of time. Now off to bed and will surely be nursing something akin to a hangover tomorrow. Note I don’t do hangovers in the normal sense as I can usually put away a fair amount of the amber nectar and still wake up with a clearish head. I am noticing a downgrading of that ability with time (age)! Anyway a good night and I am glad to have put names to pseudonyms and faces to names etc. I still advocate the real world is marginally better than the virtual world, if nothing else virtual beer is shit!!

The future of Blogging

So Guido Fawkes is claiming credit for the Hain scalp, Iain Dale agrees with him and a couple of newspaper blogs have picked up on this. I have to agree that as an avid reader of Guido’s blog the best place for updates on the Hain farrago was never the traditional media. Guido started gunning for Hain early and kept digging up fresh information, and if anyone can claim credit for this Guido can. Hain is trying to claim that he was at all times honest and upfront regarding his donations and that when he became aware of an issue was forthcoming about it, that may well be true but how did he become aware of it? Was it Guido’s blog?

This is a very interesting development in the story of blogging, for a blogger to be instrumental in the demise of a government minister is huge. Firstly it adds weight to the individual blogger, but it also means that blogs in general have to be taken more seriously. I don’t think that blogs will ever replace the traditional media but there has to be space for both and the Hain episode shows that bloggers can sometimes be bang on the money. Clearly there are thousands of bloggers out there, each taking an individual approach to their craft some treating their blog as an online diary, instantly published, others being more like a gossip forum, others like an op-ed space. That is good, blogging widens the scope for niche views to be promulgated and for things to be written about that wouldn’t necessarily be covered in a style that wouldn’t be used. To that end blogging is a huge transfer of power from the writer/broadcaster to the reader/watcher, now if a person doesn’t like the view being offered by a newspaper they can hunt the web for a blog that provides a different angle. Blogging therefore increases the sum of human knowledge by increasing the number of angles or takes on an issue that are available.

What will change now is difficult to tell, certainly I think it will be hard for newspaper personnel to be as dismissive of blogs as they have been in the past. I think also it will mean journalists paying a little more attention to stories doing the rounds of the blogosphere, often they are salacious and largely over egged but clearly sometimes they are not. I also think that you will begin to see bloggers being tapped up for more traditional media roles, maybe programs like Newsnight will start to have random bloggers in to comment alongside agents of the traditional press. Maybe they will have blog of the week slots or some such, I don’t think that would either be beyond the bounds of reason or a bad thing as it would bring different blogs to a wider audience. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we see a repetition of Iain Dale’s Daley Dozen style of thing somewhere in the media.

Finally I will say that blogging is a good thing, it would be a much better thing if even more people got involved. Sometimes bloggers go over the top, and obviously the more scrutiny that blogs get the more bloggers are going to have to be careful with regard to how they approach their craft, however most bloggers are fairly responsible, and their is no reason why blogging and traditional forms of media cannot exist in the same space.

Christmas getting at me

Sorry, no posting for the last few days been up to my neck in paper and string, decorations and lights. I will find time for a more detailed set of posts between now and Christmas itself, this will be made easier by the fact that I finish work today so that should ease the pressure on my time!

Blogging will be light this weekend

This is mega weekend for my family, we have a big sweep of East Anglia on Saturday, up to March and Wisbech, then home via Halstead in Essex. The route up is fairly easy along the A1 past Huntingdon and along various other roads, it is also familiar as we do the Wisbech run 4 or more times a year. The route back via Essex has been planned and will take us past Bury St. Edmunds, Thetford and Sudbury, I have planned the route to involve as few road changes as possible as although I am a pretty good navigator the last thing we want is to get lost and have to negotiate ourselves around back roads.

Sunday is the annual pilgrimage to the cemetary which is a little way off so it takes the better part of a morning, plus now we swing round past my Dad’s final resting place as well which is equally a little way off. Sunday afternoon will be a lot of fun though as it is the point at which the main family home is decorated for Christmas, it is a tradition that goes back a few years that we all pitch in. I do the ceiling decorations, as I am tall, Mum and the sisters sort out the tree and the various Nativity sets, musical snowmen, Father Christmases, Angels and stuff that adorn the mantel and other lower level surfaces. So all in all a busy weekend but largely enjoyable, might not get online much so may not update here for a few days!