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February 28, 2009
The Crikey blog stable is gradually becoming an empire. All they need now is a foodie, a gardener and an agony aunt and they'll have the whole universe covered. Maybe their own version of Karl Kruszelnicki could do the universe bit.
And good on them. A lot of people have found their way to blogs through one Crikey gateway or another.
The temporary Pineapple Party blog seems to be doing what it's supposed to, which you'd expect with a pretty straightforward mission.
Pure Poison is a more complicated proposition though, and it's taking a bit longer to settle in. It seems to be developing an interesting dynamic and achieving more than "exposing intellectual dishonesty in the mainstream media", partly because of what commenters are doing with it.
Jeremy said at the start that keeping an eye on Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt is a time sink, which it would be. It would also be as depressing as hanging around Stormfront all day, and should probably attract higher health insurance premiums given the mental health risk.
When they started out they copped a bit of flak for debasing the blogosphere, promoting snark and encouraging blog wars, which struck me as a bit silly really. Most bloggers get stuck into opinion columnists from time to time. And it doesn't make sense to be all democratic and public sphereish about the blogosphere on one hand, and insist on high intellect and polite debate on the other. There's no law saying you have to have a PhD and finishing school diploma to be relevant. There's also no universal code of conduct for blogs, which is one of the reasons they're more interesting than the Queen's Christmas message.
Meanwhile, at Pure Poison and Bolt and Blair's blogs, everyone seems to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Jeremy, Scott, Tobias and Ant are keeping an eye on the MSM, and their commenters are keeping an eye on MSM commenters with some interesting results.
There's an owner/author-centric view of blogs which concerns itself with what journalists and bloggers are/are not, or what they should/shouldn't be doing, but much less attention focused on commenters. Commenters are publishing too. Moderation and commenting policies are supposed to keep commenters in line, but often they don't. Whether that's a greater concern at MSM sites than others is an interesting question, but in the meantime Pure Poison commenters are doing a fine job of spotting and collecting nasty comments at MSM blogs, and they appear to be having an impact.
Some of them are using an approximation of the Blair winged monkey technique, deliberately leaving contrary comments at MSM sites just to see what will happen. Depending on your point of view, that's either a low blow or completely reasonable, all things considered. But it's the sort of thing that happens when someone like Bolt claims that's how nasty comments have been turning up on his blog, as if it only started yesterday.
It must be driving the moderators crazy, trying to sort the authentically nasty from the pretend. At the end of the day, Pure Poison is forcing them to clean up their act and reduce the volume of hate speech, in a roundabout way achieving the opposite of the result anticipated by the critics.
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I still think Bolt and Blair are the winners overall; their standing as Really Important People is re-affirmed in the eyes of their followers, their employer and their egos.
My preference is to ignore them in the certainty that if everyone but their rusted-on supporters did likewise, they would quickly become known as cranky old farts from a bygone era. Their employers would eventually act accordingly (remember pundits of yesteryear John Stone? Paddy McGuinness? John Hyde?).
I concede however that my opinion is in a minority of about 1.