Tim Blair’s blog goes “legit”.
UPDATE: Grodscorp’s weekly podcast, this time including discussion of the Blair move, is here. NSFW - frequent coarse language.
I think it’s fair to say that we here at Gatewatching have had an… interesting relationship with Tim Blair’s blog since we started posting here last year. I won’t go over the details of our spat - you can check out the archives if you like. In some ways a fight with Blair has probably become a rite of passage in the Australian blogosphere. Anyway, news is that he’s moved his blog onto the site of his main employer, the Daily Telegraph.
Blair’s blog has been one of the most successful Australian efforts in terms of traffic, not least because he’s been able to draw an international readership. He’s moved through several hosting set-ups - first on blogspot, then spleenville, then to the place he was blogging until today, timblair.net. All of this, apparently, has been independent of his work on the Bulletin and then the Tele as an editor and columnist. Now his blog has been integrated on the paper’s main site, and it esembles those of his News Limited colleagues Andrew Bolt, and Tim Dunlop (author of Blogocracy).
The old blog was moderated by an admin, Andrea Harris, and the blog required registration under a permanent user-name before contributions could be posted. This led to some criticisms about debate on the site being highly controlled and managed. Some said that commenters simply had to disagree with the prevailing climate of opinion in order to be labelled trolls, and excluded from further discussion. When we tried to reply to some of Blair’s criticisms of us on his blog we weren’t able to get on there, so I can’t comment with any great confidence on the parameters of opinion permitted on the site. I can say that most of the conversation I observed in recent times seemed to be in keeping with a lot of Blair’s ( and no doubt Harris’s) own views.
It does seem that once a user was accepted as a registered member, they were able to see their contributions appear fairly quickly, and there was definite spontaneity in the way that conversations unfolded. The prevailing right-of-centre views and hostility to “political correctness” meant that discussions there were no-holds-barred, and there seemed to be very little sensitivity around issues of (Australian-style) defamation of vilification (this could perhaps be because of the US hosting.)
All that’s about to change with the move to the Tele’s site. Conversation on MSM blogs is less immediate, may be less directed towards fostering a particular climate of opinion, and MSM moderators are far more cautious when it comes to keeping conversations within the limits of Australian publishing law. Kim over at LP puts the differences this way:
The whole set up - seemingly arbitrary deletion or non-appearance of comments, strict barriers for defamation and other legal concerns, time lag between comments being posted and appearing - means that it’s very difficult to lift the threads beyond the bulletin board model and foster genuine interaction and community.
To an extent this is all spot-on (though I’m pretty sure Tim Dunlop would want to reply to some of the other points she makes in the post). It’s going to be a challenge for Blair and his community to adapt to a different set of circumstances, where what they say, and the way in which conversations are allowed to run, has changed.
Blair’s community has been characterised by an intense loyalty to Blair himself (we have first-hand experience of what this loyalty can mean for those Blair takes a set against). Can this survive the sometimes-frustrating experience of interaction on a platform whose ultimate ownership is more risk-averse, less attuned to the temporality of blogging, and whose connection with the audience is far less personal?
I’m sure Blair’s thought it through carefully - it would be very interesting to know the terms on which he’s come under their umbrella.
Most of the blogospheric reaction so far has come from Blair’s ideological opposites - The BlairBoltWatch Project, Grodscorp (who are promising to podcast on the topic tomorrow, Tues 13th) and of course Kim’s post at LP. I’ll try to keep you up to date as more arises.
We’ll watch how this transition goes with interest because going mainstream is a choice that’s going to confront a lot of bloggers - and their communities of readers - over the next little while.
Jason, I may not have made it clear enough but I was trying to leave enough nuance in my comments about News Ltd blogs to capture a somewhat different approach to the form from Tim Dunlop. Tim has certainly tried to take some of the community/interaction stuff with him, but I think he’s been to some degree hampered by the same sorts of MSM gatekeeping I’ve written about. Tim Blair, by contrast, never interacted much in his own comments threads. You were far more likely to see Timmeh pop up from time to time on other blogs. So Timmeh, to me, sorta lived off the community his blog created rather than with and for it.