Moving Home

Well Blog home that it is ;-)

I have been toying with the idea of hosting my blog on my web space for some time. I have finally taken the plunge. Hopefully it will be easy for everyone to use and I hope you like the new design it is called Amazing Grace. I am still playing around with one or two features, so you may see a few subtle differences over time.

My New home can be found here, I hope you will visit. A welcome message and a new blog post can be found there.

PS: Let me know if you experience any problems with the site.

My Temporary Space

After a little bit of trial and error I have managed to get my latest PCS posts into a temporary place, pending repair work on the server. The new look is only slightly different from the original but I think I am liking it better. Another job for the administrator, I think I will be in trouble...

I have also been investigating a more permanent back up solution just in case there are any future problems with the server. Free WordPress isn't the answer as it doesn't do all the things I need it to do. I think I have just about come up with a viable option. At least for the time being it has stopped me being obsessed with checking who has been visiting!!!

Some of you have commented that you have problems commenting on WordPress blogs and that you have to log in and out. I have never had problems with the WordPress blogs I have visited. My username, email address and blog URL are already there and waiting on the comments forms for me. Sometimes I do find Wordpress blogs slow to load though.

But don't worry I intend to keep this blog on blogger unless something goes drastically wrong.

The State of the Blogesphere

Yesterday Liz was wondering why she had so few comments compared to other bloggers. I commented that comments in general are down lately. I seem to have just as many visitors, but not so many comments. Maybe it is because of the problem that everyone is experiencing with Blogger or perhaps we all have busy lives?

James had this to say about why blogging may be slowing down:

What does seem to be happening is that it’s killing itself off and it’s marginalized. Let’s face it, we don’t go to any blog to hear or see the news – we go to the MSM, in my case the Telegraph first, followed by Reuters, the BBC, Google for the U.S. news and The Age for the Australian. Don’t remember the last time I looked at the Guardian.

If we want analysis, we have our blog of choice – Dale, DK, Denninger, whoever. The rest of us, busily typing away, are at best marginalized, no matter how perspicacious we may claim to be. We don’t reach anyone except those wanting a quick, thirty second grab.

Maybe it is just me but I rarely read a newspaper, I just get the headlines and then do all my research from various sources on the web. From time to time I do read The Week which has done all the research already. Quick news and analysis for busy people, just what I need.

This year the Orwell Prize decided to include political blogs for the first time:

That the Orwell Prize has extended its remit to include political blogs is a sign, for Charlie Beckett, director of the Polis think-tank, that the Blogosphere has matured.

Two or three years ago, he says, bloggers were considered "outrageous scribblers and scurrilous rumour-mongers".

Now they have become a "fact of life" in the mainstream political debate.

Shane Greer of Total Politics magazine believes that blogs can be fitted into four categories:

The first, big group are those blogs that are "truly awful". Second are the blogs such as Burning Our Money - which analyses in detail how taxes are spent - which are thoughtful and well written, but only of interest to a small, technically-minded community.

Then there are sites that cater for a more general audience, which operate more like the comment pages in newspapers, giving a forum for debate and finding the most interesting arguments from the more technical blogs.

Finally, there are the "attack blogs" such as Devil's Kitchen, which are out there to snap at the heels of everyone else and fight for a particular political view.

Right, that is all the political blogs taken care of but what about all those other blogs out there...

To mark the 70th Birthday of Orwell's Diaries, the Orwell Prize started publishing the diaries on line in the form of a blog. The first post was on August the 9th exacltly 70 years after the diaries were written.