Welcome once again to the Britblog Roundup, that collection of your nominations of the best from these isles this past week. You can send entries for nexrt week’s to britblog AT gmail DOT com. One comment on The Guardian’s little

Morethanthis? I think it’s the lact of comments that lead me to not read Norm as much, he’s on my feed, but I tend to just scroll past. Whereas other blogs I come back to regularly just to see comments (like this one, for example).

Comments, to me, maketh the blog. And I get my fair share of anonymous trolls same as the rest.

I really must show you my visitor stats some time, Robert. Harry’s Place, I ain’t. It’s more a question of, as Mat says, not how many but who, I think.

I don’t really understand why Guardian Unlimited couldn’t just put a disclaimer up on CIF saying “no responsiblity for commenters’ opinions/content of external links and such” just like the BBC does. The old Guardian newsblogs, troll-infested as they were, still allowed commenters to include links in their posts. The blog is very new, and I hope they’ll change it to allow links.

Ergo; if it’s good, it gets linked to. On a day when I’ve got writers block, I just throw links to good stuff around; I know it’s pointing people in the direction of other well written posts or covering issues that are important.

You’re right that not all of them are quality. When I first started, the blogroll was going to be just the best. But then, well, I kept finding good blogs, so it became ‘all the politics blogs’. But then I found some dire ones, and decided to filter at least some.

But then, everyone has at least one good post in them, right?

Robert; the issue with success meaning you can’t engage any more is why I think group blogs are, medium term, the way to go. Most of the time, someone asks Paul a question, I can answer it, and vice versa. Of course, getting a co-blogger whose views are almost identical to mine was fortuitous to say the least.

On the other hand, if we get so succesful we become broadcast, then the ad revenue becomes enough to do it full time, right? Giving us more time to respond…

If your memory goes back long enough you may remember the Modern Review, the first organ that was entirely “Low Culture for Highbrows”; stuff we find weekly in every glossy magazine today. Those glossy magazines took many years to catch on to the idea - that you could write serious articles on someone or something that was popular as opposed to lauded.

This is where the importance of comments, interactivity and linkage comes in… and where BBC blogs and ‘Comment is Free’ fall down.

Clay Shirky’s essay on Power Laws and Weblog Inequality is interesting reading about the rise of A-list bloggers:

“At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean “media we’ve gotten used to.”) The transformation here is simple - as a blogger’s audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can’t link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can’t answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.”