@Harold High Pants No, I haven’t lived there but I do remember that ‘Liberal’ seemed to be 2007/2008′s equivalent to ‘Flip Flopper’. Or am I mis-guided?

@Ed Interesting POV. Would you like to write something a bit longer about it? Here… or… somewhere else?

@Laurel Yes, it’s a weird one that. “Introducing, Laurel Papworth, a woman from Australia.” Referencing is cool. I should probably mix it up a bit more. I guess getting back into writing more often, I’ve really just wanted to get my cobwebs off and I’ve been a little puristic about it.

@Alex Yes, I can see how that would work in that situation.

@Ben Mmmm… ‘digital guru’… it hurts so good.

@Graeme Yes, mediocrity is an interesting one. In the late 90s when CD-Rs, burners and computers became more affordable, there was – almost overnight – a slew of mediocre music in my mailbox (when I was doing music journalism stuff). No longer did people have to go through the challenges presented by getting vinyl (format of choice at the time) pressed. As a Corporate Comedian, it would be interesting if you wrote about mediocre comedy. Would love to read about that.

@Bill I hear you. I don’t know if I’d refer to myself as a blogger. I just like writing – and publishing it somewhere. Dig your website… almost said ‘blog’!

@Nat Sounds like you have a bigger bit of writing in you on this topic!

@Stephen Sorry. I admit that since Obama got in I don’t watch Fox News quite as much. Not that they’d adopt that line of thinking but you know what I mean.

I do find it very strange though, that as a journalist himself, he would make such a sweeping statement in relation to Bloggers as if there were no varying degrees of skill or merit among them. Specifically, he says that from “Bloggers” we get “something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”. This, quite frankly, is bollocks. Of course, most of what’s out there is utter rubbish, but then personally I think most of what’s published in mainstream media is rubbish too. This being said, I agree with Graeme’s comment above: there are some out there who are creating gems among the rocks. There are brilliant scientists writing about science, economists writing about economics and even marketers writing about marketing, all on their own blogs. Just because they choose to publish their ideas in this medium doesn’t make them morons.

I could go on about this for ages. So I’ll leave it at that before I vent myself into a fury!

For me the term blogger still conjures up images of sad, mildly loony people pushing crazy agendas or writing daily diaries of no consequence, while online journalist or columnist feels respectable.

Guess which term I don’t use to describe myself?

Precisely because digital is so instant, any moron’s immediate, self-indulgent thought or inane mobile phone photo or video can be rapidly exposed to a global audience, via Twitter, YouTube or whatever. It’s publish first, regret later. Sad thing is, most of these digital drongos have no idea how mediocre their drivel is, so there is, alas, no ‘regret’.

As a Corporate Comedian and Hoax Speaker, all of my scripted material passes through a tough filtering process before making it as far as the public arena. Not so with Web 2.0. Anything goes.

The simple fact is: blogging is neither good nor bad; it just is. As always, it’s the person using the platform who is to be applauded or pulled off stage with a hook. Mark, you are to be applauded. Trouble is, it’s a pain wading through the bog of bad blogs to get to the goodies.

It’s not bloggers or Twitter or YouTube who are the enemies – it’s mass mediocrity. Without doubt, courtesy of Web 2.0, we are currently seeing the biggest dumbing down of publicly available content in history. (To the 0.00001% who are creating gems amongst the rocks, I’m not talking about you.)

Actually, the rise of mediocrity could make for an interesting blog post. What do you think, Mark?