Thanks for the comment. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Blogs are a new medium that does for content, creativity and opinion what the printing press did in the 15th Century – it opens it up to people to chip in with their 2 cents worth (almost said tuppenceworth there… shameless plug).

What pissed me off about Tom Kitt’s comments (and the comments of the Assistant Director of Services at the LGCSB is that they seemed to miss the point and had consigned bloggers to the realm of cranks because bloggers criticise and question and don’t accept the simple spin. Often the people who get most exercised are people who know a lot about a thing. And the contributions from noobs and other interested but less informed people simply helps to bring the discussion to a level that people can understand.

One of the most published articles i’ve written on Informtion Quality was about the way the Dept of Environment tackled the problems in the Electoral Register. It started as a slightly technical post but through comments and questions I rewrote it as a more accessible piece which has been published in the UK, the US and Australia (but not in Ireland…)

And if a Person is smart but People are stupid, where does that leave the “wisdom of crowds” theory? The higher standards that I refer to are higher standards within the blogging community – we need to raise the bar for ourselves with regard to how we communicate – that includes fact checking, keeping the head about things (no one listens to/reads angry rants – even informed and intelligent ones. However there are times when it might be justified), writing well (e.g. only using profanities when abso-fucking-lutely necessary).

In short – what we choose to do we need to do well.

As for Bertie.. harrumph. Sometimes the challenge is knowing what battles to fight and when… it isnt that people don’t care about it, but there is fatigue setting in. When it is all finished, the facts will probably be drowned in a tidal wave of “thank fuck that’s over”. If i was cynical I’d be forgiven for thinking that was the plan all along.

Firstly, “If an Open Source solution falls in the forest and there is no developer community to hear it, is your solution f*cked?” – Genius line!

Secondly, I can see how your focus could be drawn by that Dick’s handling of the Electoral Register and Gormless’s apparent disinterest. If I was to politicise, I would wax political about this issue.

Anywho, my point is that your view of bloggers as (in many cases) being part of the mythical ‘informed society’ is an interesting one. A line from Men In Black, of all things, always stays with me – “A person is smart, people are stupid”. Many of these bloggers are very intelligent, but it’ll be sometime before they constitute an informed society. We need only look at society’s disinterest in the carry on of An Taoiseach to see that we are not seeking any higher standards. Your comment, “An informed society require higher standards” is probably true, but I fear it’s just an untested theory.

I agree with you that the standard of some blogs should be better, but that’s true of any publicly available material. There’s always going to be a variety of standards. That’s why we have The Star and The Times, Nuts and Esquire.

“Some of us are already elected officials, some of us might consider running for office. Some of us might be advisors to your opposition. It’s not because we’re bloggers. It’s because we’re citizens.” How true this is! That’s where blogs differ to other media. A blogger does not need to be a trained journalist, a highly paid consultant or an expert in their field. They need only have passion and the fact-checking you mention, and they will have an avid readership. Perhaps this will lead to that ‘informed society’ and then perhaps we, society, will seek higher standards. Perhaps then, but not yet.

A great post, but, I think rather than quelling my quantity of questions, you’ve exacerbated the entourage of enquiries I’m entertaining.

(And Val Kilmer rocks!)