Leighton Andrews and the blog police
Friday, December 08, 2006

Leighton Andrews is frequently mentioned as one of the Welsh Assembly's most famous bloggers. He's linked to in all sorts of places, and gets a lot of attention for doing something a great deal of ordinary people do quite routinely.

However, he's an elected representative, and therefore his willingness to at least make some effort at communicating with people via his blog is commendable.

But Leighton doesn't seem to fully understand the medium.

Blogs have comments, and other bloggers are commenters. The internet is democratic, and it is now more than ever about debate.

Some bloggers wish to moderate comments and that, I suppose, is fair enough.

But policing comments is something totally different. I've now remarked a few times on some of Leighton's posts, but he seems to have chosen not to publish them.

This would be somewhat against the spirit of blogging. Politicians already inflict their monologues on the traditional media; there's no way they should do the same with what is meant to be a discursive and democratic medium. Blogging is, more than anything else, a conversation. Otherwise, get a column.

Peter Black, the other 'Assembly blogger', gets it. And his blog is one of the best political blogs on the block.

I hope it's just a technical error and that Mr Andrews's site can become a forum for some genuinely interesting debate.

UPDATE: Comments are now appearing on Mr Andrews's site once more. Good stuff!

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posted by Blamerbell @ 11:22 am,

4 Comments:

At 2:13 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's completely untrue, isn't it.

One of your comments is clearly posted on Leighton's blog here:

http://leightonandrews.typepad.com/leighton_andrews_am/2006/11/burberry_campai.html#comments

 
At 2:34 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aw, poor bugger. Leighton is already doing a suspended sentence for a previous Internet Conviction.

 
At 2:44 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

You are talking complete nonsense. Leighton Andrews's blog has comments from all kinds of people -even AMs from other parties!

No blogger is obliged to print every comment. Get a life!

 
At 3:18 pm, Blogger Blamerbell said...

"That's completely untrue, isn't it?"

I hope so.

"One of your comments is clearly posted on Leighton's blog here"

Yes, and I've written others since.

"No blogger is obliged to print every comment."

Of course there are some comments which a host shouldn't publish. Iain Dale has a very worthy policy of ignoring comments which swear or insult. However, if (and I emphasise if) comments which are merely contributing to the debate insitgated by the blogger in his post aren't published for any other reason, I think that's a great shame.

 

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