THE SELF-SERVING LIES OF TORY BLOGGERS
As we all know really, blogging is an extreme form of vanity publishing, and bloggers like to think of ourselves as more influential than we really are.
Nevertheless, the recent expose by bloggerheads that top Tory bloggers Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale have been puffing up their stats claim is interesting.
These two claim to be the begemoths of the UK political blogging jungle, and Iain Dale writes a book each year, purporting to survey the entire field of political blogging in Britain but which systematically excludes opinion to the left of the Labour Party.
The issue picked up by bloggerheads seems to be that both Guido and Iain are claiming that the number of unique visits their blogs get are in fact unique visitors. Iain Dale provides a screen capture that shows he had 239368 visits last month, but he claimed that was the number of visitors. (If I visit your house twice, it doesn’t make me two people)
But hang on, even this modest Socialist Unity blog got 163864 visits in March, and I am sure Lenin’s Tomb gets similar numbers. This is obviously less than the Tory blogs, but we are in the same order of magnitude.
Yet in Iain Dale’s book of UK political bloggers, virtually none in his top 100 political blogs are left wing. The process by how this came about is explained by John Angliss who helped Dale rank the left bloggers.
“If this is a result of the e-mail you sent out entitled “Top 50 Labour Blogs”, then there’s no wonder that Lenin’s Tomb wasn’t included. Many of the best left bloggers are outside Labour… “Left” didn’t appear in the email once, whilst “Labour” appeared three times, so I assumed this was merely confined to Labour bloggers. Apologies to those who got missed out because of my mistake.”
Iain Dale himself replied:
“On the left wing list I asked a group of half a dozen or so left of centre bloggers to come up with their top 50 blogs. I sent them last years top 100 but made clear they could add as many others as they liked. There seems to have been confusion over whether they were all to be Labour blogs or whether leftist ones could be included too. I suggested they used the same methodology as I used last year but said they could use their own if they wanted. I just needed a Top 50. So if they put a blog 1st it got 50 points and if it was fiftieth they got 1 point.”
On this basis, Lenin’s Tomb came 260th!
At one level, so what? The way that blogging works is that writers find their own audience, and it is the mass of individual decisions to read a blog or leave a comment that decide their success or otherwise. The exclusion of left blogs from Iain Dale’s book is not a question of bruised egos, because it is not just that one or two of the sucessful left political blogs were excluded from Iain Dale’s list, nearly all of them were. Out of his 100, perhaps only ten were in any way left wing, and they were not the blogs that have bigger readerships.
Given that Iain Dale’s book becomes a standard reference work for gauging political opinion this does matter, especially because Dale makes no reference to the weakness of his method in his own account and then draws conclusions from his own distorted evidence. He argues:
“There are all sorts of theories as to why the left wing blogosphere in Britain hasn’t really taken off, many of which are discussed elsewhere in this book. But it is a truism to say that there is not a single left leaning blog which attracts a mass audience and the kind of influence enjoyed by several right of centre blogs. The challenge for the left over the next twelve months is to put that right.”
But of course by publishing a book that excludes the evidence that there are left blogs that in fact get reasonably high readerships, Iain Dale is perpetuating a myth that the ideological consensus in society as a whole is the same as the narrow political consensus of the Westminster village. This crude manufacturing of an illusion of consensus is part of the crisis of democracy in this country.
Publish your own book then!
However, in all seriousness, I do recognise the flaws in methodology used in this and never pretended that these lists were definitive. Very happy to listen to suggestions for a better way of doing it this year.
And can I make clear that I have NOT inflated my figures at all. I have been totally transparent. Extreme Tracking and Google Analytics use different terminology - Extreme says unique visitors and Google Unique visits - yet the figures they both come up with are within 1,500 of each other. The best measure to use is the Google Absolute Unique visitors, of which I have around 54,000. I provided the screenshot as proof, more than my critics have ever done. In future I intend to make all my figures publicly accessible through Google Analytics, as I gather they have just made that possible.
Comment by Iain Dale — 10 April, 2008 @ 12:11 pm
Well Andy you can put that right again in 2008 by publishing your excellent Socialist Unity Top Political Blog Awards like last year so that we get a left view of the Blog world.
Neil
Comment by Neil Williams — 10 April, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
Perhaps after the election neil, we can get a number of left bloggers of different persuasions to vote on it.
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 April, 2008 @ 1:09 pm
““There are all sorts of theories as to why the left wing blogosphere in Britain hasn’t really taken off, many of which are discussed elsewhere in this book. But it is a truism to say that there is not a single left leaning blog which attracts a mass audience and the kind of influence enjoyed by several right of centre blogs. The challenge for the left over the next twelve months is to put that right.”
To be honest, why do we take Tory Ian Dale and backer of Boris seriously? Serious question comrades. Why don’t we compile a list ourselves rather than waiting for Dale and his piss-poor methodology to do it for us.
And Dale’s list last year had very few women leftie bloggers appearing in that list and again, there are feminist bloggers who don’t particularly associate with the Left (sometimes understandably) yet many have good left-wing positions, some are socialists and are utterly outstanding in ideas and analysis yet they don’t merit any inclusion.
It just seems such a fixed and rigid way of determining who is left.
Comment by Louise — 10 April, 2008 @ 1:49 pm
Louise - please, please, please can we have just one comment from you that doesn’t mention Ken and Boris? We’ve all got the message but many of us are bored rigid by this London-centric monomania.
Comment by Keith — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:08 pm
Keith
No one has a lower opinion of London than me! BUt unfortunetaly the current London mayoral election is of UK wide significance. As Louise is in the middle of the election campaign I am sure she feels that more acutely than most. :o)
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
Very sorry Keith, and as they say…you don’t have to read it. And frankly, comrade, I will comment about what I bleedin’ well want to, ok?
Comment by Louise — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
Actually Keith I was commenting about the lack of leftie women representation on Dale’s list, if you had cared to read it properly.
Comment by Louise — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:22 pm
Indeed, Louise, a poll of the top feminist bloggers would be very useful, do you fancy it?
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
Two points - it is probably true that there is more blogging on the right especially some of the vicious, vile racist, sexist and homophobic stuff common in those quarters. Just look at the more political centre blogs such as New Statesman to see how horrid they are. Or the cretins that contribute to the Evening Standard. My goodness, makes this site seem sophisticated! The man reason is probably class- they have the money to buy the broadband and have access - nothing sophisticated there. Iain Dale may be fairly accurate, despite admitting methodological limitations himself (#1)
On #5 Keith - perhaps you should have had the decency to read what Louise wrote first before you posted. She doesn’t even mention Ken and more to the point its about feminist contributors of whom a few may live outside London.
Comment by Sarah Hart — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:27 pm
#10
Thanks Sarah, much appreciated and valued your comment. Indeed, there are feminist contributors who live outside London.
Comment by Louise — 10 April, 2008 @ 2:38 pm
Andy: “Indeed, Louise, a poll of the top feminist bloggers would be very useful, do you fancy it?”
At some point. Been thinking of doing something like that and good idea….
Comment by Louise — 10 April, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
With regard to Sarah Hart, since when has broadband been a class issue? The majority of internet users in the UK use a broadband connection these days and its not seen as a luxury.
As for the popularity (or lack thereof) of left wing blogs it all comes down to market forces, something the internet is all about. If you cater in a blog to what the public want in a manner that they enjoy, you’ll get hits. If you don’t then you can’t exactly make them turn up can you?
If the right wing blogs are more popular, then it’s because a, they’re better or b, they represent the views of the majority.
Comment by Dave H — 10 April, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
Of course you could accept ads on this site
It would provide an income to allow the team to up the content and increase the # of hits
a virtuous circle
Comment by Tinnus Bummus — 10 April, 2008 @ 5:57 pm
I’m not a Tory but I suppose all us right-wingers look the same to you. Whatever my thoughtcrimes might be, making up my figures is not one of them. I publish them openly.
Comment by Guido Fawkes — 10 April, 2008 @ 11:36 pm
“I publish them openly.”
Yeah Guido, you just don’t show your face openly.
*Where’s that YouTube clip of Newsnight*
Here it is:
Comedy Gold
Comment by Darren — 10 April, 2008 @ 11:41 pm
Iain Dale and Paul Staines (’Guido Fawkes’) are STILL peddling this bullshit defence? FFS.
Google does not use the term ‘unique visits’, it uses the term ‘visits’ … to describe the number of visits, NOT the number of visitors or unique visitors. The term they use for the number of unique visitors is ‘absolute unique visitors’
What Iain did, which is made perfectly clear in this this easy-to-follow grab from his post was take the figure for ‘visits’ from Google Analytics and present it as a figure for ‘unique visitors’.
I have explained this very clearly in this post.
BTW, I’m loving the repeated use of phrases like ‘making up figures’, ‘inventing figures’ and ‘inflating figures’ as a defence in a clear-cut case of someone MISREPRESENTING figures.
Again, they seek to take one thing and present it as another.
(That said, I place every trust in a vote that Iain conducted that put him and his mates at the top of the list.)
Comment by Tim Ireland — 11 April, 2008 @ 8:37 am
Oh, I forgot to mention… though their deeply flawed defence has been put forward in a number of comment threads, Dale and Staines haven’t presented it on their own weblogs. So much for being open.
Comment by Tim Ireland — 11 April, 2008 @ 8:58 am
#13 Dave H. broadband and internet access may not be a luxury to you, but is to many working people and those on benefits. Even a single mum who has a connection, may not have access if her teenage son or daughter needs it in the evening. How many of Boris’s friends have this problem?
Also, many leading blogs are set up and controlled by powerful concerns. You seem to think that it really is the case that ‘comment is free’.
Comment by Sarah Hart — 11 April, 2008 @ 11:10 am
Sarah, Hart, you really are clutching at straws if you believe that single mums who have a connection to the internet don’t use it when their kids are finished with it. The ONS reports that 61% of UK households are connected to the internet including I would imagine a lot of the low paid and unemployed. You also have to picture the fact that a lot of these working people aren’t interested in politics and wouldn’t read any kind of blog anyway.
As for leading blogs controlled by powerful concerns, well nobody makes you or me read them, it’s personal choice. As I indicated before if your blog is interesting, people will read it, if it isn’t then they wont. This applies to single mums as well as millionaires.
Comment by Dave H — 11 April, 2008 @ 11:56 am
Once again we should be asking ourselves about the right wing domination of the media
we only have ourselves to blame, most left blogs are boring or slag of the same old people, sold out by the leadership etc etc….
but very few workable realistic ideas to build a better society now….
Comment by harry Hill — 11 April, 2008 @ 4:19 pm
An alternative ranking system:
http://www.wikio.co.uk/blogs/top
Comment by lenin — 11 April, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
Come off it Lenny
You know as well as I do that you blog does not wrank that high
My God Devils Kitchen rangs in the early teens which is about as likly as me voting for Lindsey ” sodomy is not a shiboleth” German. A view I suspect she shares with the BNP
But more to the point how are these rankings constructed please?
Comment by Tinnus Bummus — 12 April, 2008 @ 9:16 am
Just as a thought any idea what the hitwise data says?
Comment by Tinnus Bummus — 12 April, 2008 @ 10:07 am
This is a useful thread on HP
Shows how Lenny gets his hits
http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2008/04/11/left_behind.php
Comment by Tinnus Bummus — 12 April, 2008 @ 6:08 pm
The struggle against Lenin’s Tomb continues…
Comment by johng — 12 April, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
The struggle against Lenin’s Tomb continues…
They’d better step up their fight then. According to Alexa:
“Leninology.blogspot.com has a traffic rank of 471,812″
“Eustonmanifesto.org has a traffic rank of 2,411,320″
And all that traffic from people searching for Euston station too!
Comment by M — 12 April, 2008 @ 7:53 pm
Erm I’m afraid richard has brought this on himself
It’s a crap blog by the way.
My current faves for leftist blogs are HP and this one. h and Dave Osler
Anyone got any other opinions
Comment by Tinnus Bummus — 12 April, 2008 @ 7:53 pm