As I mentioned in my last post, we’re at the start of the silly season and that, due entirely to publication schedules, I’m sure, means its also that time of the year when Iain Dale starts soliciting votes for his annual guide to political blogging:

In early September TOTAL POLITICS, in association with APCO WORLDWIDE will publish the 2008-9 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. It will contain articles on blogging by some of Britain’s leading bloggers, together with a directory of UK political blogs, and a series of Top 20s and Top 10s. The book will be available at the Green Party, TUC, Labour, LibDem and Tory Conferences, where TOTAL POLITICS will have exhibition stands.

We’re asking for your votes to decide the Top 100 UK Political Blogs. Simply email your Top Ten (ranked from 1 to 10) to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com. If you have a blog, please encourage your readers to do the same. I’ll then compile the Top 100 from those that you send in. Just order them from 1 to 10. Your top blog gets 10 points and your tenth gets 1 point.

The deadline for submitting your Top 10 is Friday August 15th. Please type Top 10 in the subject line. Or you can of course leave your Top 10 in the Comments on this post.

Once all the entries are in a lucky dip draw will take place and the winner will be sent £100 worth of political books! The rules are simple:

1. Please only vote once
2. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents are eligible or based on UK politics are eligible
3. Votes must be cast before Friday 15 August
4. Blogs chosen must be listed in the Total Politics Blog Directory.
5. You must send a list of TEN blogs, ranked. Any entry containing fewer than ten blogs will not count.
6. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name

So, once again, the email address to send your TOP TEN BLOGS to is…

toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com

This year’s voting round has got off to something of a controversial start with Bob Piper and Liberal Conspiracy both announcing that they won’t be taking part – and as for me, well…

I had a few things to say about Iain’s list last year and pretty much everything I had to say then still hold, as I see it, but as we’ve moved on a year and I’m commenting before the fact there are a few other observations I think I can usefully make.

‘Best of’ lists are subjective things at the best of times, and all the more so when compiled on the back of the vicissitudes of a public vote. What is popular is not necessarily what is good and, in any case, the standards I personally apply when I judge what I consider to be good, when it comes to blogging, may be very different by which others make their own judgements.

That’s true of all such lists and also a major part of their appeal. No soon as you start putting things in some sort of rank order based on, notionally, which of them is the best or most popular then you get people talking about and questioning the ‘judgment’ of those who compiled the list and whether its an accurate reflection their own personal tastes of fits in with their ideas of what should, and should not, deserve to be considered the best or most popular.

Exercises like this aren’t particularly highbrow, unless its the BBC doing some pretentious list of the greatest philosopher or classical composers, but lists are fairly cheap to compile, make fairly decent filler for newspapers on a slowish news day and if you’re a TV company and can raid the clips archive and hire Jimmy Carr for the half and hour necessary to knock-out a bunch of 30 second links into and out of the commercials, then you can easily fill up a couple of hours of dead air for not much money and draw some fairly decent ratings, risking only that you might spark off a drunken pub brawl or two over whether Nogbad the Bad really was a better cartoon villain than Dick Dastardly.

Iain’s got a new politics magazine to sell and from a purely marketing stand-point it would make sense for him to run just this kind of exercise this year, even if he hadn’t done it before.

In other words, its all a bit of fun and nothing to get too caught up in – at least from where I’m sitting.

From where Iain’s sitting, however, things could be a little different.

Leaving aside the whole ‘who dominates the blogosphere thing’, which is all getting a bit overdone, last year’s list turned out fairly well as a reflection of where the British scene had got to at the time. You could quibble of over the relative placements of some of the blogs in the list and argue that some came out lower in the ‘pecking order’ than they actually merited and others came out looking a bit overrated (and remember, that’s why these lists grab people’s attention) but otherwise most of the blogs that I expected to be in and around the ‘top 100′ were there and there were very few entries in the list, as a whole, that left me wondering just exactly who, other than their immediate family, might have voted for them – and there were as many of those from the left as there were from the right.

I’m sure Iain’s hoping for much the same kind of outcome this year, in fact I’m fairly sure he’ll have realised that just about the last thing he needs when he’s trying to pitch Total Politics as being relatively neutral in tone and content is for the whole thing to turn into a wholly partisan pissing contest between party-aligned hack blogs. The credibility of the list, as an exercise, very much rests on its containing a reasonable mix of left, right and centrist blogs, on independently minded blogs maintaining their strong showing of previous years and on it remaining primarily focussed on bloggers and not falling under the domination of those professional journalists who blog from the websites of national newspapers and who have the advantage of leveraging votes from a, theoretically, much larger potential audience.

I wouldn’t be in favour of excluding the pro’s, some, like Danny Finkelstein, Benedict Brogan and even Fraser Nelson have legitimately ‘earned their spurs’ in adapting to mores and conventions of blogging, but it needs to be said, generally, that some newspapers do take an overtly censorious approach to interactions with their readers, not just in terms of weeding out abusive or libellous comments, but in refusing to publish comments that correct factual errors or otherwise show that a journalist hasn’t done his (or her) homework in research a story and that, for me, runs counter to the whole ethos of blogging as a free exchange of ideas and debate.

Perhaps the other point to make is that its maybe a little questionable as to whether a professional ‘group’ blog like the Spectator’s Coffee House should be treated in quite the same way as somewhat more ad hoc group blogs like LibCon or the Wardman Wire when it comes to the pro’s use of paid bloggers (Melanie Phillips, Stephen Pollard and Clive Davis). There is, I think, something to be said for treating identifiable blogs that operate within a group blog as being a separate entity from their host, with same thing going for the Telegraph’s blog and the Indy’s Open House. Maybe its just me, but I wouldn’t be inclined to vote for the Indy’s Open House, collectively, just on the strength of the two Indy columnists whose work I do enjoy (Mark Steel and, believe it or not, Dominic Lawson) blogging on there. It’s not that it matters in practice, as only Mark has ever written anything for Open House and only then a couple of posts several months apart, but as a matter of principle I’d be more than happy to vote for either, individually, but not for their host platform.

Getting back to the main point I am trying to make, by linking this year’s guide/list to Total Politics, pretty much the last thing Iain will want to see as an outcome is a list that looks for all the world like its been compiled only by inveterate ‘fans’ of single political ‘faction’, and least of all if it looks too much like the top 100 blogs as compiled by ConservativeHome.

In short, if individual bloggers want to personally shill for votes or group blogs and collectives like Bloggers4Labour and LabourHome want to encourage their readers just to send in their votes then that’s fair enough, but if anyone – on any side – is harbouring any dumb ideas about organising a ballot-stuffing exercise through Facebook then don’t, because Iain’s on a hiding to nothing if that happens.

In that sense its worth reflecting on the difference approaches that bloggers have taken to promoting Iain’s current poll.

It’s noticeable that amongst established bloggers most have chosen simply to publicise the poll, either with a short ‘hey. this is happening’ post and a link or by cross-posting the content of Iain’s post, as I have here. Some have certainly mentioned where they came in last year’s lists and a few, very few, have summoned up the energy to mount a self-deprecating shill based on a jokey reference to needing an ‘ego boost’ – but otherwise everyone’s taken a pretty relaxed view of things other than the refusniks.

So far as the left goes, we’ve seen some generic ‘please vote for left-wing blogs so we don’t get swamped’ stuff from B4L, LabourHone and a couple of others but, again, no clear signs of anyone getting too competitive about it.

However, when we come to the newer and lesser known Tory blogs, some seem to have got the idea that Iain’s list is something akin to a general election, the Oscars and the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards all rolled in to one, with ‘Twydale Tory’ Alan Collins already well out in front in the ‘you’re taking this all a bit too seriously’ stakes with this effort, in which he explains why we should vote for him (???)…

If you are wondering why to vote for me, then here are just a few reasons:

1. I provide a healthy mix of local and national news, as well as personal commentary.
2. I am always here to speak out for things I believe in passionately, even if it (occasionally) goes against the party line.
3. I am always here to speak up for residents and champion their causes.
4. My blog has received praise from numerous politicians and is visited frequently from local council and Westminster IP addresses.
5. My musings are always topical and my arguments are always informed.

Alan – if you really need to explain to your readers why they should vote for you then…

Out here in the blogosphere, you stand or fall by what you do week-in, week-out and not by where you end up in an annual poll.

The blogs that do ‘well’ – that successfully grab an audience and, more importantly, keep that audience, all have a couple of things in common.

One is that they’re consistent – you go back time and time again because you know what you’re going to get in terms of quality.

The second is that, whether deliberately or accidentally, they’ve all found a niche for themselves and give their audience something that they don’t quite get anywhere else in quite the same way, and that’s as true for the high-traffic blogs like Iain, Guido, Political Betting, EU Referendum and Slugger O’Toole as it is for mid-listers like me, DK, Mr Eugenides, Chicken Yoghurt and others.

A couple of years ago I had maybe 350-400 blogs listed in my RSS reader and I tended to add just about any blog to that list that linked to me or commented on any of my output. Today that list runs to no more than 50 or 60 blogs. I don’t have the time to keep up with that much information and where I do want to maintain a general feel for what going on in particular sector of the blogosphere then I look for an aggregator, like Bloggers4Labour, otherwise I’ve become pretty selective about who I choose to read on a regular basis and I pick and choose those blogs that give me something different to the rest or cover a particular field better – in my estimation – than anyone else I’ve come across.

What i’m trying to say, to any blogger reading this, is that getting on Iain’s list might well feed a bit of extra traffic your way for a few weeks after the publication of the Guide and give you a bit of an ego boost, but unless you got that something extra that gives people a reason to come back, then you’ll be no better off for having tried to shill your way into the top 100 than you were when you started out. It just not worth getting competitive over an exercise like this because pretty much all blogs naturally find their level and their own particular niche over time and if you haven’t found yours yet then you’re better off putting the time into looking for, and developing your own style and your own audience, than you are hoping that an appearance on Iain’s list will boost you up into the blogging stratosphere.

It won’t.

So my advice to everyone, for what its worth, is simply that if you want to vote then choose your ten favourite political blogs and send Iain an email, and if you don’t, then don’t vote – It’s your choice. I’m not going to try and influence anyone, one way or another, either on whether they should or shouldn’t vote or on who they should or should not consider voting for. The freedom to think for yourself is just about the one freedom that no one can ever take away from you, so use it.

That’s the best advice I can ever give anyone.