Classic blog posts for Martin Bright of The Spectator

Last Monday I attended the "Commentariat vs Bloggertariat" event organised by Editorial Intelligence as I blogged about here. during the event, Martin Bright of The Spectator claimed that he had never read a "classic" blog post. I suggested that he might not have been looking in the right places and I promised that I would send him some. I then created a thread where I asked for suggestions. Some of you have responded to this and I have also received some suggestions in private. I have a couple of my own too.

Exactly what constitutes a "classic" blog post is open to a great deal of debate. I suspect that Mr Bright is looking for something that looks and reads like a traditional newspaper comment piece but is then as good as the best of those. I am not sure this is a valid comparison as the medium of blogging is more immediate and open. Great blog posts can be short and punchy, they can be hugely long and rambling as well. The format and length of them is almost entirely in the hands of the author. There is no word limit or format that they have to squeeze into and this gives freedom that newpaper comment writers cannot have.

Anyway, What I have decided to do is list everything that was submitted to me along with a brief description for each. I will Make Mr Bright aware of this post and he may wish to respond either here in the comments or on his own blog. They are in no particular order.

• El nominated this excellent post from Lib Dem activist Costigan Quist on Himmelgarten Cafe which makes a very strong point about the fickle and contradictory nature of public opinion when it comes to politicians and democracy. I would argue that this could easily be published as a comment piece in a national newspaper and is up to the standards of some of our best columnists.
• Jennie Rigg pointed out that blogs do not need to ape newspaper columns and that this post by her friend Stacey is a classic blog post because it succinctly communicates important information in an easily accessible way.
• Prolific blogger Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire nominated his "David Aaronovitch" simulator from last year and also this very detailed and multi-faceted piece of campaigning analysis from December last year called "Durham Cathedral Shop Finances and questionable Saint Stephen the Great payments".
• Matt also nominated this perfect example of immediate and on the spot citizen journalism from Nosemonkey's EUtopia which is a contemporaneous blog post updated in real time during the events of 7th July 2005.
• manc_ill_kid has nominated this contribution from The Filthy Smoker on Devil's Kitchen blog entitled "Fake Charities". This is a strongly worded critique of how certain charities are largely or exclusively funded by the government and yet present themselves as grassroots organisations. There is a particular focus on anti-smoking charities. Regardless of your views on this it seems to be a very well researched and argued piece with lots of sourced quotes.
• Julian H has nominated what he describes as a sweary rant entitled "Lansbury again, and the fallacy of Wenger 'ruining English talent'".
• Oranjepan from Reading List has nominated this little gem called "The Truth Is Out There" which juxtaposes two "unrelated" stories from his locale.
• Tory Outcast nominated his own summary of the cabinet resignations and government disarray earlier this month entitled "Can't keep up".
• John Richardson via email nominated this post which he describes as "Martin Stabe's blog on Terence Blacker's criticism of the New York Times publishing a piece by blogger Eugene Volokh in 2004 is a classic, and relevant to the current debate.".
• Bill Quango MP has nominated his "Having an old friend for dinner" post from last June which imagines a conversation between Gordon Brown and Brendan Barber in the style of The Godfather.
• Michael Fowke has nominated this post entitled "The Financial Times: a vision" from his "Money is the Way" blog. It is a very long stream of consciousness of the kind that I suspect would never be published in a newspaper or magazine but that is one of the big advantages of blogging that it allows people to express themselves in an unconstrained way like this.
• I would like to nominate a pair of blog posts from Costigan Quist (again!) and another Lib Dem activist Charlotte Gore. They are two of the best Lib Dem bloggers in my opinion and in this exchange from just a few days ago Charlotte describes how she thinks she is not suitable to put herself forward as a Lib Dem parliamentary candidate and Costigan responds with his view of how democracy is broken if people of the calibre of Charlotte feel they cannot contribute.

I think in their different ways all these posts listed above demonstrate the strengths of the blogosphere in different ways. Doubtless people will have views on their relative merits but I think this provides evidence that there are indeed "classic" blog posts out there and doubtless we will continue to see many more.

Please feel free to continue to nominate other classic blog posts in the thread below.