So, I put up a comment on Samizdata, which gets picked up and made into their Quote of the Day, which in turn gets picked up by Sir Instapundit himself.  Bingo, 200,000 readers^*. Sure as hell beats toiling away in this blogospherical backwater.

Many thanks to Johnathan, Samizdata Illuminatus and Glenn.

^*Estimate based on Instapundit’s Sitemeter stats and my very own fudge factor.

Some people don’t half hide their light under a bushel.  Under the title 1888: A More Than Mind Games Film and described by the producer as, “… a rough, experimental one at that.” we get this:

It’s only the first-ever film - all 18 frames of it.  Plus, as an extra special bonus, the similarly succinct second-ever film.  And they’re great.  Three-hour Hollywood blockbuster directors, take note.

Bearing in mind that the film itself has precious little to do with football and James Hamilton’s blog has precious little to do with anything else it does raise the question of whether it should be there at all.  Since the dawn of blogging I have accepted that, just as Ronseal does exactly what it says on the tin, blogs should do exactly what they say in the title and description.

But should they?  The blog EU Referendum never talks about the EU Referendum (not that there’s much of one to talk about) and not even that often about the EU.  But is it any worse for that?  Do I, as a reader, lose out?  Not as far as I can see.  I find their digressions fascinating.

Perhaps it’s time to propose Crozier’s Specialised Blogging Rule: while a specialised blog must start off specialised, it can branch out into any damn thing it likes once the author gets bored.

Guido was on Newsnight last night.  Seems he had been offered his own slot along with panel discussion and he took it.  Big mistake.

I’ll come to Guido’s pre-record later.  It was the panel discussion, with Jeremy Paxman in the chair and Michael White of the Guardian as guest, that did the damage.  Guido’s attempts to conceal his identity have always been amusing.  I think I managed to work out who he was in about five minutes.  But to persist with it on the show when everyone knows who he is was ludicrous. 

You have to imagine the scene.  Guido is in shadow with the exception of his trademark flash of Dickie Davies-like grey hair.

“Why do you conceal your identity?”, asked Paxo.

“So that people can’t recognise me.” Or something like that.  Yeah, that flash of grey is so common that I have to dredge out a TV personality from the 70s to illustrate who I am talking about.

Two minutes later White had spilled the beans anyway.  Guido is Paul Staines.  Golly, who would have thought it?

All along the Paxo/White tag team managed to make Guido look petty and inconsistent.

Now the pre-record was sort of OK but its central argument - that journalists are far too cozy with ministers - while true enough, was insipid.  Here was his opportunity to go on national television and give the world the hardcore libertarian line - that politicians are a bunch of good-for-nothing parasites and the sooner that they find alternative employment sweeping streets the better - and he didn’t even attempt it.

But the real problem was always with the panel discussion.  The golden rule with panel discussions - a rule that until yesterday Guido understood and does once again today - is don’t do them.  They give the producers much too much power and allow them to claim balance while giving the debate a slant rarely seen since the final moments of the Titanic.

Ah, Guido agrees.  Sort of.

Adriana addresses a worthy but is still in no mood for taking prisoners:

Individuals often have more control over the online environment than off-line. Paradoxically, many commentators bemoan the fact that people online are self-obsessed, they talk about the echo chamber. At the same time, they also complain about the lack of awareness, sophistication and professionalism of online interactions. Both may be (and are) true but this points to something else that is going on - people are learning something. They are learning self-determination and unlearning decades of one-way communication and mass broadcasting. The ability to express and respond to things on their own terms and their own way is what this is about.

“...unlearning decades of one-way communication and mass broadcasting.” Yes.  Yes, indeed.

I don’t think I’ve ever used one of these round-ups to link to Samizdata before.  My guess is that anyone who comes here also goes there.  And also because - for various technical reasons - Samizdata articles tend to slip through the net, round-up wise.

But I think there is a principle here.  If this is to be any good as a round-up I should be giving space to articles I like even if every single reader has already read them.  This is where to find the best articles in the Blogosphere, n’importe quoi.

Anyway, Samizdata is always good but this week I particularly liked:

Thaddeus Tremayne’s piss take of David Cameron’s Europe policy; Brian Micklethwait on that global warming documentary and Johnathan Pearce’s challenge to Mark Steyn on the subject of demographics:

...as people get richer and no longer have to rely on big families to support parents in their dotage, birth rates fall. It seems to happen pretty much everywhere, including in those countries with very different religious and cultural traditions.

Right, enough of Samizdata.  Now for what has been going on elsewhere:

1. Adriana doesn’t think much of television:

   I stopped watching TV a few years back soon after I started blogging on Samizdata.net [did I speak too soon?]. These days when I switch it on for whatever reason, it feels oddly one-way and restrictive. You can’t choose what and when you are watching something you are interested in, the controls are pathetic compared to what I am used to online.

   That’s exactly how I feel about television these days.  Who else one wonders?

2. Christopher Hitchens writes on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and “bogus equivalences”.

3. Douglas Murray reviews Nick Cohen’s new book and picks out this gem:

   I feel like a class traitor when I say it but the first lesson from the “heroic” age of the Left in the Thirties is that it never works like that in a conflict in which your own society is involved. You can be a critical friend of one side or another, a very critical friend as often as not, but you have to choose which side you are on, and those who don’t usually end up as the biggest villains of all.

4. And finally… Latvia: they do things differently there

   

1. ‘Vietnam troop commander William Westmoreland gruffly announced during one commission hearing that he was not interested in leading an army of “mercenaries.” Friedman coolly replied, “Would you rather command an army of slaves?”’ From a Reason bio of Milton Friedman (hat-tip: A&L)

2. “In the first government defeat, the Lords voted to rule out using sexuality, criminality and cultural or religious beliefs as grounds for diagnosing a mental disorder.” Yes, you read that right.

3. Squander Two fisks Tony Blair.  At some length.  He also defends Blogger from the techno-snobs.  I am inclined to agree with him.  The days of the permalink crisis are long gone.

4. Jackie reviews an Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor who also suffers from manic depression.  Jackie also manages to get to the root causes of gang culture in a sentence:

   One of the girls made a good point about the fact that lots of the boys who have these guns are more afraid of those around them than they are of the law…
   

5. The other week I linked to some colour photos of Russia from the 1900s.  Here are some (coloured rather than colour, I suspect) from the 1890s.

1. Harry Hutton considers the issue of smoking inspectors:
   

   If we can raise a fighting fund of £500,000 we can probably drive many of them into exile, arranging for gangs of hoodlums to break their windows, drag them from their homes and tar and feather them.
   

   Ha! Unlikely, for sure, but looking to the future, is it really beyond the bounds of possibility?

2. Just when you thought it was safe to surf free of pop-ups, WordPress (of all people) bring them back.  Jackie isn’t too impressed either.

3. Free market think tank sets up school.  Or does it?

4. The standard version of the Madrid train bombing is that the government tried to pin it on ETA when, in fact, it had been carried out by Islamists.  John Chappell begs to differ.

5. A photo of Roman Abramovich from the 1980s.  Seems there’s nothing new in the blank expression, even when, as it would appear here, he has plenty to smile about.

6. Helen Szamuely feels the need for a German national identity.  Which begs the question, if they don’t already have one, what is it that is keeping them together?  Also check out Helen’s article on Willi Munzenberg - Josef Goebbels’s propaganda nemesis.

7. France’s Socialist Party has selected a good-looking woman to be its candidate in the up-coming Presidential election.  This has implications.  But only an economist can tell us what they are.

8. Don’t fancy yours much… Mark… Anthony.

9. I know this item is called: “If you haven’t already...” but I have never made it clear what you may not already have done - read it, or seen it.  For instance, while I have read this article on bullying in the Russian Army I haven’t seen it and I am not sure I want to.  The British Army, of course, is so much better.  While we’re on the subject of English Russia don’t forget to check out, well… everything.

Toodle Pip!

Brian Micklethwait has a theory.  He hasn’t actually written it down yet and he may not so you’re going to have to put up with my version which may, in all manner of ways, be wrong.  If it is then, well, Brian, my apologies.

Brian’s observation is that while in the past everything got an average of three stars, these days everything gets four and a half.  His theory about this is that in the bad old days newspaper reviewers got sent a lot of things they didn’t want to review but had to anyway.  But these days reviewers are amateurs, they only encounter things they are probably going to like, so their reviews tend to be good ones.

This has a parallel in my own life and probably yours too.  I have noticed recently that unless I make the mistake of switching on the telly, I hardly ever encounter an opinion with which I don’t heartily agree.

The point about this is that the online world is fragmenting existing societies.  We are starting to form into our little groups which have almost nothing to do with one another.  Instapundit readers have little to do with their IndyMedia or Kos counter-parts.  There are for all I know, Muslim discussion groups out there in which the participants earnestly but politely debate the merits of killing infidels by hanging or boiling.

What I find interesting (and indeed alarming) is the apparent contradiction between the physical and virtual worlds.  In the physical world the Dhimmi-boiler could be living next door.  We would be sharing the same streets and (more worryingly) the same polling booth.  In the virtual world he might as well not exist - at least not from my point of view.

The frightening thing is the historical parallels.  It is not as if this hasn’t happened before.  During the Reformation, as new religious beliefs started to spread, many people must have found themselves totally alienated from their neighbours.  The lucky ones, like the passengers on the Mayflower, were able to up sticks and found their own settlements, the unlucky found themselves imbroiled in the mother and father of all religious wars.

Is it to be the same again?  If so, is there any way to escape the carnage?

Update.  Seems I have prompted Brian into writing down what he actually thought rather than what I thought he thought.  So, you didn’t have to hack your way through the foregoing screed after all.  Sadly in his review of my review of his thoughts he only gives me four stars.  Not the extra half? Oh well. As he says: “On the internet, if you get grumpy, you aren’t doing it right.”

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last week or so.  The reason is that Stefan Molyneux’s series of podcasts have provoked rather more thought than I had expected.  I am currently working on a response (see here) but it may take some time before it’s ready to be posted.

Croziervision has been down for a couple of days.  A very odd error (aren’t they all).  In the end it was a fairly simple solution - repairing the database - but sounds a bit scary.  Anyway, if you are using Expression Engine and your site suddenly gets replaced with an “Error 1016” this is probably the reason.

Apologies for the sparsity of posts over the last couple of weeks.  This is because I am working on a little project that is taking up a lot of my time.  Hopefully, you will see the fruits of this before too long.

Blogs are great.  They allow us to get things off our chests and to be read.  But they lack depth.  As a friend likes to put it: “I have met many people who have changed their minds from reading a book but never from reading a blog.”

What would be good is a guide to libertarianism.  Something that describes what it is and why it would be a good thing.  Something that has all the arguments and all the facts (or, at least, as many as possible).  Something that answers the reader’s questions.

Describing libertarianism is easy but assembling the facts and arguments difficult.  Brian Micklethwait described this in the Tyranny of the Facts.  He argued that it was pointless for libertarians to indulge in fact fights because our opponents were simply too numerous and too well-funded.

That was before the age of the internet which changes everything.  In theory, the internet allows every libertarian in the world to collaborate with every other one to create a guide that is thorough and constantly up-to-date.

But how?  Blogs don’t really cut the mustard.  Although collaboration is possible, editing (pretty much) is not.  Once a post is up that’s it.  Wikipedia, on the other hand, postively welcomes editing.  Watch this online lecture (hat tip Adriana) about the evolution of the Wikipedia page on the heavy metal umlaut.  See how it evolves from one line (a stub as it is known) to a comprehensive page.  See how it resists attempts at vandalism.  See how good it gets and remember that every single word has been written by volunteers.

Wikipedia’s only real problem is when it strays into controversy.  Everyone in the world can edit a page - and they do.  Victory goes to the biggest bully.  This is a problem for libertarians.  Firstly, there aren’t that many of us.  Secondly, we have better things to do than take on those who make up with persistence what they lack in rationality.  Fortunately, there is a solution: membership.  And Wiki software (yes, they have that too) allows you to do this.

Looks like I’ve just given myself a job.

When I first heard about Technorati I didn’t see the point.  Yes, all the bloggerati were getting excited about it and filling in their Technorati profiles but it didn’t seem to do much.

Now it does.

This is because in recent weeks they have added searches and categories aka tags.  This means it is much easier to find out what is going on in the blogosphere something which has long been one of my bugbears.

It’s not quite there yet.  For instance, there are too many tags with different names that mean the same thing eg Great War, First World War, World War One, World War I.  A tag search will bring up the most recent posts first, so there tends to be a lot of junk.

But I think they are on the right lines. This may well end up supplanting feed aggregators as the first port of call.

Someone (who clearly ought to get a real job) has followed the trail.  As he says:

“Mysterious. It seems to have come over from the UK, entered into the sex-blogosphere and then was picked up by Catholic bloggers. From there it went to Libertarians, then lefties, and now the GG.”

Via Jay.

Is there something wrong with internet advertising?  I ask because I notice that I pay precious little attention to internet ads.  I don’t pay that much attention to normal ads but it seems to me that ads on the internet grab even less of my attention than the more traditional variety.  For the most part, whether they be on blog sidebars, above blog banners or on newspaper web sites I simply don’t notice.  If they are those annoying pop-up types I make a mental note to blacklist the advertiser for forever and a day.

Is it the internet, the advertising or just me?  I don’t think it’s just me.  I note some of Tim Worstall’s frankly desperate attempts to generate click-throughs which suggest that most other readers aren’t paying much attention either.  (Note to Tim: it’s not you that I am having a go at but the situation.) Also, while it is easy to name publications that have retreated behind paid-subscription walls eg The Spectator and The Independent it is difficult to name publications that have moved the other way.  It implies that readers aren’t noticing the ads, or at least, not in the way the advertisers would like (I am thinking click-throughs here).

I hope it isn’t the internet as a medium.  As I have said before, all this content (well not all of it but certainly a lot of the reportage and the professionally written commentary) has to be paid for.  I don’t mind paying for it as such but I do object to paying for it on a publication by publication basis.  I want to be able to access everything, from the Times and the Independent to Peruvian Railways Monthly, for a flat fee, perhaps on the same sort of basis as Napster To Go.  It’s just that I don’t see how that is going to happen, at least, not in the short term.

But if pay-per-view won’t work that leaves advertising which, as I said, doesn’t seem to be doing well.  It could be that the internet and advertising just don’t mix.  Why that should be I do not know.  The internet seems to me to be very similar in terms of distance from medium, content, size (more or less) to the daily paper.  But dead-tree newspapers make a fortune from advertising while their live-electron cousins do not.  Is it because the albeit slight, size change makes all the difference?  Or is it, perhaps, because internet advertisers demand click-throughs when actually they should just be concentrating on getting their name known in much the same way they do when the sponsor sporting events?  Or maybe, they are quite right to concentrate on click-throughs but have yet to work out a way of making those click-throughs happen.

Ryan Sagar:

The entire point of the Internet—or at least the reason for its success—is that it takes money about as far out of the equation as it can get. Tens of thousands of blogs can reach as many people as are willing to listen for dollars a month. Sure, not every one of these blogs has the capacity to create fancy videos, animations or other bells and whistles. But a lot of them do—and not just those in league with moneyed interests.

For TechCentralStation.

Apologies to regular readers for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks but I haven’t been very well.  Anyway, I am a lot better now and hopefully, I will soon be back into the swing of things.

This looks like being big stuff for all sorts of reasons.  Original post here.  Michelle Malkin’s round-up (she seems to be making a reputation for this sort of thing) here.

Via Instapundit (he says breaking his own rule).

Regarding British blogs:

En tête de liste, le blog de Guido

According to Radio France

This article by (usually wrong) Simon Jenkins on blogging has not garnered as much attention in the Blogosphere as one might expect (except here where I first heard about it).

This was the line that caught my attention:

British papers need not worry — as yet. Such much-cited blog triumphs as the toppling of Eason Jordan, the CNN executive, and the humiliation of CBS’s Dan Rather would not have needed the web to expose them in Britain. They would have been splashed across every tabloid. The American press remains timid. The Patriot Act suffered nothing like the press mauling given to Tony Blair’s control order legislation.

Remember Piers Morgan.  The internet didn’t figure.  Up to now I have assumed that where the US leads the UK will (eventually) follow.  But maybe not. 

Of course, this does beg the question why the tabloids (and indeed the broadsheets) don’t lay into the BBC more often.

UPDATE.  OK so it has gained some attention in one or two places.

Or should that be new old title?  Anyway, I was never going to be without Croziervision for very long - it’s kinda catchy and I like it.  v3.0?  Well there have been one or two previous versions. 

Incidentally, I’ve also set it up so that www.croziervision.com is now the URL for the home page.  No need to update existing links, though - these will still work.

In a follow up on IDS’s Guardian article Brian suggests that the Blogosphere may well serve to expose the Conservative Party’s divisions and thus to undermine it’s hopes.  I don’t think so.  The reason I think this is because the right-wing Blogosphere in Britain is remarkably united.  There are very few issues upon which it disagrees.  Thus it is not going to be exposing any divisions.

So the Blogosphere’s not going to be a negative.  But will it be a postive?  I think yes.

The Blogosphere’s main job is to keep the MSM honest.  When that starts to happen Conservatives will get a better press.  When they get a better press they will feel less guilty about being Conservatives.  When they fell less guilty they will start to say what they believe.  As they do Conservative policies will become more, well, conservative.  And because they will be getting a better press they will also have a better chance of being elected.

QED.

Further to the IDS thing, Norm Geras reckons its “user-neutral”.  I, for one, am quite happy to let him believe that.

The Guardian has printed something intelligent about blogs and Iain Duncan Smith is the byline.

Feeling better yet?  Guardian?  Iain Duncan Smith?  I know, I know.  Now while we can’t be sure that IDS wrote it we can be sure the Guardian published it.  Instapundit says so, so it must be true.

IDS reckons that blogs are going to change the way politics operates in the UK.  Who knows perhaps it will force politicians to stop taking the credit for the work of their poorly-paid minions.

UPDATE.  Brian thinks that while it may be good for the right it might not be good news for the Conservative Party.  And Guido has this:

The dead-tree-news medium is slow and lazy, the need to cozy up to political sources makes them unwilling to be as ferocious as they should be in a healthy democracy.

For those unfamiliar with the Easongate, I am probably not the best person to go to for a summary but here goes:  Jordan was a CNN executive.  In a meeting in Davos, Switzerland he is alleged to have claimed that the US military was assassinating journalists.  There was a tape of his remarks.  He was alleged to have prevented that tape from being broadcast.  The blogosphere kicked up a fuss.  The MSM (mainstream media) did almost nothing.

And now he has resigned.

Splutter.

In Rathergate the MSM did take notice.  But in this case they didn’t.  And still the guy had to go.  How come?  I am flabbergasted.  The only explanation (that I can think of) is that the Blogosphere is so powerful these days that the MSM can no longer even protect one of its own.

But how is that?  It’s not as if blogs are that widely read.  Glenn Reynolds gets some 150,000 hits a day.  That’s about one out of every 2,000 Americans.  And he’s the biggest.  But he’s clearly punching way above his weight.  I can’t imagine the brahmins of the MSM particularly care or, indeed, know of his opinions.  But they are clearly acting on them.  The only thing I can imagine is that, in some way, opinions seep, partly via the internet, partly via word of mouth.

Golly.

I get a namecheck from David Carr at Samizdata (which was nice) while he was wondering whether us bloggers were having any influence.  Not yet he reckons and I think I probably agree with him.  But I reckon it will come.  As I say in a comment:

For what it’s worth, I think it’s just a critical mass thing. The US is a bigger country and a richer country so it has more bloggers. Plus it has Instapundit. Plus a lot of US issues are, in fact, global issues.

Crawling out into the light