James Crabtree of VoxPolitics says that the recently published political map of weblogs tells us more about the linking policies of bloggers than their ideology. Given that the map is based on the kind of links that the blogs pick up he is clearly right.
After all Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit, who would both be on the hard right of the Tory Party are at the centre (!!!) of this map, while Matt Welch, a kind of contrarian liberal, features on the far right. As James says there are two types of linkers – zealots who link to their ideological pals and whores who either link to everyone or to people they like to criticise.
A look at this blog’s links would have me clearly in the whore category and it is of course a term I became accustomed to hearing during the pre-war debate. But come to think of it, all British blogs link across the ideological divide so are we all whores now?
Reading Vox Politics also took me to this interesting article by James on the Left and Blogging.
The blogsphere is an example of Willard Quine’s coherence theory of truth: that things are true if they agree – or appear to agree – with other things that are held to be true. Right-wing bloggers are thus creating their own world, in which their truth exists often without debate. And the same may be about to happen in the UK. The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: “There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all – all – on the right.” But political blogging is in its infancy here. It remains up for grabs. Got a computer? Got a view? Get blogging. There is a war to be won.
Indeed. If Pollard is the only major blogger of the left (and he calls himself a neo-conservative remember and names Rumsfeld as his political hero) isn’t it about time we lefties did something about this?
Watch this space…….