“Blogging, above all else, is conversational. It is social. It is networked. There are two key features to the blog: links, and comments. Fail to include either, and you’re talking to yourself.”

I agree with Paul that blogging is social. But, by failing to include links and comments, are we really “talking to yourself”?

Nah. This seems a very technocratic definition. After all, journalist Paul Carr’s blog is undoubtedly a blog, but has no comments (for reasons he explained here). Marketing guru and author Seth Godin only does trackbacks, not comments, on his very popular (and influential) blog for reasons he explained here. One of the fathers of blogging, Dave Winer, hasn’t had didn’t have comments on his main blog for years. Winer, an often hectoring voice online, was left open to accusations of not taking what he dished out. [Update: as pointed out in a comment here, Dave does now have comments. Mea culpa.]

So what’s missing?

I’ve long said, without really explaining myself, that often blogging is, really, the first form of journalism born of the web. Blogging has changed both the way we think about creating a piece of digital journalism, and the way that piece of work is digested after we’ve clicked “publish”.

It’s probably time to explain myself.

You see, when we decide to use facts to describe or discuss an event, issue or idea, it’s reasonable to say we’re producing journalism. And I’d contend that bloggers often do just this. And I’d further contend that the best bloggers are going into this with their eyes open; they have a keen awareness of at least four factors (I’m sure you can think of more) which make their kind of work different from, say, print journalism, or broadcast, or anything else.

Let’s take a quick look at the four factors, and how they change the end product.

• A story will be commented on. Journalism has always been discussed, if it had any importance at all. But the internet brings together people who really know what they’re talking about, wherever they are. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, their thoughts will appear in comments under your article. And, if they do, you may be reminded of what Dan Gillmor said, five years ago, about readers knowing more than you.
If you’ve done well, they’ll only be debating finer points or offering more information or context. Even praise. But if you’ve written rubbish, they’ll be there to put you right.
You can turn the comments off, but you cannot stop that informed discussion taking place. It will simply move elsewhere. I think Paul and Seth, from my examples earlier, realise that.
The impact of this: stories may be more fair and less conversational (to avoid needless confrontation), may be more solidly researched (to avoid embarrassment), may be better sourced (to support an argument). Everything is written with an important truth in mind: the subjects of a story and the expert readers may bite back, and have the best tools in history to do so.

• A story sits within an ecosystem. Stories don’t live by themselves any more. There’s little excuse not to link to online sources, but even if content fails to include links it is not immune from links’ power. The best blogging shows us how links increase transparency and build trust by showing where a fact came from.
Linking confers authority on the linked-to – we all know how Google works, right? – but it’s less often noted that the linker gains authority too, in a less direct way. Example: not all readers will follow the link, but more savvy readers might simply be reassured it is there (and mouseover it, to see where it leads).
Linking out can also win new readers looking for a trusted guide to take them through the welter of information out there. This is as predicted in 1995 in what, as my regular reader knows, is my favourite digital journalism essay.
The impact of this: journalism becomes more accountable, as readers start to expect – and get – more precise attribution of facts and quotes. It’s no longer enough to tell us what you know; ideally, you show us how you know. Meanwhile, a new form of almost entirely link-based digital journalism, as energetically evangelised by Jeff Jarvis, Scott Karp and others, gains currency and audience. Link journalism should also be cheaper than other kinds. This may be a growth area through the credit-crunched journalism world in 2009.

• A good story will be debated elsewhere. Partly related to the ecosystem point above; bloggers know their best work will be the work that gets dissected across the web, point by point. That provides a strong incentive to make sure it’s correct or, at least, well-argued. It’s hard to retract, clarify or say sorry once your work has gone viral.
Blogging brought about the interest in tracking that conversation, and spawned some of the tools to help do so – for instance, Technorati and trackbacks. Two imperfect technologies, I know, but influential I’m sure – we can now see exactly what people are saying about our work, and gauge its reach.
The impact of this: stories have always had a life beyond initial publication, but that life has now become much bigger in scale and over time. It’s also more trackable even if we, in publishing, are still struggling to properly document it. But that’s another blog post, I think. For now, we need to be aware of that afterlife stories now have, intervene in debates hosted in places not our own, and on occasion use it to inform our work next time.

• Debate is imperfect. I’m being polite – rather than saying blogging brings a sudden awareness that some people are halfwits, or bullies who deliberately and dishonestly look to distort what you say. Let’s just say grand, open, public debate is sometimes an inefficient way to get to the truth of a matter.
The people brought together to comment on your work may not, of course, really know what they’re talking about at all. Indeed, they may be the least qualified buffoons ever to have opined on your given subject.
‘Twas ever thus, down the pub at least; it’s just that the web makes it very obvious to see all these imperfections, and that can appall those who have, somehow, managed to live in more civilised worlds until now. But there’s still an impact here; trolls have a chilling effect. Unregulated, this distortion can distract and dissuade people with interesting things to say. It remains a challenge to create troll-proof online spaces. We need to work out better ways to deny the halfwits a platform, while maintaining and enhancing that platform for the best voices.

There; four factors. But the real legacy of blogging is that we now understand that when publishing online – blogging or not – we have no choice as to how social, how “webby” our work becomes. As long as we publish digitally, we will be discussed. Our work will always be social, unless what we produce is so narrow or lacking in interest nobody gives a damn. The platform doesn’t matter. Comments on or off, links out or not, trackbacks enabled or not, Vignette or WordPress or Tumblr or Twitter or handcoded, hardcore HTML… none of that matters.

Soon, we’ll always have the blogging mindset when we’re working online. The market will demand it; readers will be baffled if we don’t link to our sources, and view us as one would a screaming lunatic in the street if, online, we preach or hector without – at least – a very precise understanding of what we’re talking about.

It’s a world that calls into question lots of journalistic givens – not least the value of being a non-specialist journalist. It’s tougher to be a columnist, too, unless you are capable of game-changing arguments supported by your reporting prowess, wide access and deep knowledge. It’s a world which may accord trust more on individual rather than institutional reputation. It’s a world that favours quality – although quality may mean many different things. It will be a world in which, praise be, we can probably drop the word “blog”.

In short, this is the assimilation of blogging into the mainstream, and is what some of us have been expecting, even hoping for, since we first posted.

A few agreed with my general theme – that it really wasn’t up to snuff – while some thought I was too harsh, and should be giving Number 10 far greater credit for even engaging with new web technologies in this way, because few governments – if any – do.

On Perfect Path, social media guru Lloyd Davis points out that a major part of the work on the new site has been to install “better plumbing” – WordPress. Simon Dickson, who’s behind the site, agrees in comments this was an early milestone.

All of which is fine – WordPress is a very fine CMS, and now much more than just a blogging platform. The geek in me says it’s reasonably cool Number 10 is using it. But platforms are, of course, immaterial to users – they only see the output – and it still leaves the question of the site’s purpose. 

Part of the problem is that those of us working in the digital world view social media as a Very Good Thing. If you were around for web 1.0 you know it has brought the kind of interlinking of people and ideas we were dreaming of back in the day.

We see the values of Web 2.0 – of information sharing, collaboration and creativity – a unambiguously good and important, so it is hard to be critical of any site that claims to support those values, especially when it emerges from the highest echelons of government, even if the only evidence of that support is using the same tools as we do.

The drawback of this approach, though, is that not everything is a social media problem. Not everything needs to be bashed by the bloggy hammer. Being better at blogs than other governments is a doubly pointless measure of success; we can’t, after all, choose to be ruled by, say, Sweden, if it has a more enlightened approach to comment moderation.

So we need to ask if putting photographs on Flickr, videos on YouTube, and adopting a blog format for press releases really achieves anything, whether or not the comments are switched on.

What is this site’s purpose? Lest I be accused of being entirely negative (it’s been said) let’s look a something this site could be doing.

The government is not shy of complaining that its message is distorted by portions of the media. So one thing this site could do is allow access to briefings on what decision has been taken, or which position adopted, and why. That’s beyond a press release, or a press conference transcript, or speech text.

How exactly that explanation is delivered – through text, graphics, data or video – is up for debate, and is also where the space for innovation is (see MySociety). But what you’re trying to do is explain is the PM’s tactics for stopping knife crime, improving public health, reforming the NHS or dealing with Russia. I’d be fascinated to see more of Brown’s briefing material around these things (while accepting some, especially around foreign affairs, might be classified for good reason). After all, I’ve helped pay for it. I suspect many others would be too – not least Britain’s small but (finally) growing band of political bloggers.

This is the obvious social media angle here, also alluded to by Lloyd in his comments. It is not about building a social site at Number10.gov.uk. It’s about something much, much harder – something that runs counter to the DNA (even the interests) of all governments – being more transparent.

Maybe that’s the trouble here. As Ben Hammersley said in comments on the last post, “What bothers me is the mismatch between what they have to play with, viz a distinctly non-interactive, non-webby PM, and the choices they made.” Maybe this site really is just a roughly-executed Web 2.0 veneer for a very 1.0 PM, and without addressing that fundamental problem it can’t do things properly.

But as things stand, it’s neither starting a conversation, nor facilitating one.

Poor old Gordon Brown. Not only is he struggling with the traditional Prime Ministerial work of managing a sticky economy and anticipating major armed conflicts, all while on holiday, but he’s got the new world to deal with – all this web wonkery that’s sprung up since that Spring day in 1997 when he entered government. There was no time in opposition to prepare for Twitter, that’s for sure.

One has to fear his lack of web time is tripping him up. Building a new website for the PM is, undoubtedly, a tricky brief, but a more savvy Downing Street would surely not have allowed the new Number 10 website to go public without a lot more work. Yes, it’s labelled “beta”, but that’s not an excuse. It’s been around for days now, but it’s trying too hard, too obviously attempting to get hip to the social media jive.

Before we even start on the difficult social stuff, there are the basics to consider. For a start someone should, surely, have checked some domains before using the phrase “Number10tv” as the name for the WebCameron-esque video section of the new site. One assumes they didn’t check, because on www.Number10.tv the far-right BNP has its video channel (I’m not providing a link for obvious Googlejuice reasons). Over on www.Number10tv.com another opportunist has stepped in to post a “satirical” version of the official site (“Watch PM Brown as he dithers over the most pressing issues of the day!”).

Oh dear.

On the site Number 10′s consultants did build, things are better, but still not good. For a kick-off, the design’s at sea – the search box is crashing into the navigation on at least one browser, lines roam everywhere, a colour palette is unevenly applied and there’s a bit of a typographical disaster going on all over. 

Trendy features are present and correct, but meaningless. Sure, the press releases are in reverse chronological order, and have a little calendar on them, just like blogs. The headlines are serifed, just like A List Apart. Share buttons – the usual Delicious, Digg, Facebook – hang around hopefully, in the unlikely event anyone’s going to want to breathlessly tell their friends about a press release from Downing Street. But it all means nothing if the content and the intent aren’t there. Dig deeper, and it’s hard not to see all this as slightly cynical use of web 2.0 lipstick to tart up a banal 1.0 reality.

Which brings us to the content. There’s nothing, inherently, wrong with this stuff, but it remains traditional broadcast, one to many. There are the releases, snaps of Gordon meeting Barack, video of Gordon making a speech, lots of anodyne historical stuff that I suspect (I’m no historian) Wikipedia does better, and certainly in more depth. No, there are no links out to that, as far as I could see. But – oh God – there is the Twitter channel. I daresay it was inevitable.

But conversation – real conversation – between users is off-limits. I’m told they’re using WordPress to power the site. WordPress is the blog platform that powers this, and tens of thousands of other, blogs. So they’re actually turning comments off to achieve all this. Meanwhile they rely on YouTube and Flickr to display some still photographs and video (although “Number 10 TV” – the official version – uses the Brightcove platform), but comments are turned off on those third party sites as well.

I know they’ll worry the Daily Mail will do its dinger the moment a user says something nasty or obscene. There’s probably no budget for moderation. So why bother?

The idea, one assumes, is that enthusiastic subjects will find this stuff because it’s in their social media world, not the Number 10 silo, and that they’ll then want to favourite and share it all, motivated by the sheer delight of finding footage of Gordon Brown addressing the Knesset. I’ll let you decide if that’s likely, although I note the video of that speech has done just under 600 views on YouTube since it was posted a week ago. I’m not sure if that’s bad or, actually, remarkable. Maybe there’s a lot of clicking around Downing Street itself.

Either way, the whole is just a bit off. It’s like hearing a script from Yes, Prime Minister recited by someone who doesn’t speak English. The words, the gags, are there, but there’s no understanding of what this really means, and what it should change. They’ve turned a trick, yes, but one that’s not nearly good enough. Having read the story of Hillary Clinton’s campaign disaster on TheAtlantic.com today, and the extraordinary strategising that went on there (and she still lost) I wonder: would any credible political campaign in the US accept this site?

Authenticity is the key here. Blogs, when they first appeared a decade ago, brought with them an expectation of a conversational tone, of genuine interactivity, of someone being at the other end of the line. It’s clear that Gordon’s not – of course he’s not – he’s running the country. That reality makes it hard to achieve what this site pretends it does. Using these tactics, of pretending this has been touched by the Web 2.0 magic, reduces this site to tokenism, another wobbly piece of scenery on the stage Gordon Brown is trying to claim control of. It really doesn’t help.

OK – one for all you copyright gurus out there…

In an incident that may make you laugh, given my day job, I reckon a damned MSM company – AOL – has stolen a photograph I took to illustrate a post, as seen above.

The image was nothing special – this snap of Alcatraz I took while in San Francisco a few years ago – but the AOL blog Gadling used it to illustrate a piece (if you click through, that’s not my image on there now). As you can see, they stuck my name on the bottom of the image and linked back to the original Flickr page, but my position is they did that in breach of the Creative Commons license I use on Flickr, which clearly forbids using the image for “commercial purposes”.

Sticking my image on their corporately-owned, advertising strewn page is, in my book, a commercial purpose. They’re using my content as part of their editorial proposition.

I complained on April 12, when I found they’d been using the image (for around two months) and they removed it quite quickly. It took until yesterday to send me an email, however, saying:

“The picture in question was taken from a public gallery on Flickr and used for an editorial purpose, not a commercial use. Gadling used a thumbnail sized photo which linked back to the original source and which provided you with attribution. The important distinction here is that it is not the user of the photo that must be examined. In this instance, the use of the photo was for an editorial purpose and therefore allowed under the creative commons license you granted.”

Now, to my mind this is close to the old “it’s on the internets so must be free” excuse of old. They’re augmenting that by saying I shouldn’t look at the publisher of the page – big ol’ ugly AOL – but the use, which was editorial. Does that make it free? I doubt it, but I can’t be sure.

So I’m interested in this on two levels. First, are they right? Is this particular level of CC license such that, in fact, a large corporation can use your work on their commercial site without paying up? If that’s the case, I think there are lots of CC users out there who should know. What is the commercial purpose that CC license forbids if it’s not something like this? I’ve no problem with anyone using an image licensed for commercial use… but this? I’ve heard lawyers in the UK snort derisively at the whole CC idea… is it, in fact, pretty much useless?

Second, if AOL are wrong, I’d be surprised if they haven’t used a bunch of images in this way – there may be quite a few people being ripped off. It must be a rich source of free photography for them.

That said, it’s not the money I’m interested in – I’ll happily donate that to charity, if someone with expert knowledge can help me prove the principle. This seems like something that would be interesting to pursue. If anyone can help, or knows someone who can, do let me know in the comments, or by email.

I’ve been watching with wonderment as All The Big Bloggers soil themselves in fury over BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy’s splendidly misguided attempt to interview Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest digital festival in Austin, Texas. [See it all on video, or just the worst bit]

I watched from the discomfort of my desk here in London, and was going to try and thread my miscellaneous thoughts into some grand meta-theme, But, frankly, having popped my back carrying my MacBook to Manchester and back yesterday, I’m hardly in the mood.

Instead, some bullet points, arranged through the painkiller haze in roughly in the order they occurred to me. We all prefer lists, don’t we? It’s just like real PowerPoint, after all.

• First, some sympathy for Lacy. Indeed, my first idea for this post was to complain that the audience simply blithely turned up without doing any background research on Lacy at all. I mean: have they read BusinessWeek lately? If they were looking for insight or revelation, they’d have done better heading for the bar. They shouldn’t have been surprised at the soft-sudding Zuckerberg got, or the BusinessWeek hack’s clear belief she was a big part of the show (as so wonderfully caricatured by Paul Carr). But then I thought nobody would get the gag – sarcasm doesn’t work on the page, does it?

• Then, I came to think of it, I’d seen Lacy in action before – she “interviewed” Kevin Rose at LeWeb in Paris in December. I’d rated her session pretty pointless and anodyne then, but hardly worthy of a blog post, let alone a salvo of abuse.

• The person who suggested that Robert Scoble should have stepped on stage and done the interview instead proves only one of two things: (i) that satire is alive and well and spending some time in Austin, Texas OR (ii) that crack abuse is still worryingly prevalent in the interactive industries. And proves my next point, which is…

• Lacy does get more abuse, I’m convinced, because she’s a woman, and good looking. Were she a grey-haired, paunchy old man from BusinessWeek, she’d have been written-off, I’m sure, as a bit lame, but the scandal wouldn’t have erupted so.

• Lacy doesn’t help herself by using flirting as an interview technique, or by making clear in a video interview after The Event that she’s so big-time and Big Business Writerly that she hardly needs to pay attention to the geek audience which only wants to know about APIs and shit. Jeff Jarvis makes some good points about what went wrong with her interview. I’d offer that she seemed more concerned about how she came across – through a lens irrelevant to the setting she was actually in – than how her interviewee came across, or the utility of the whole exercise to the audience.

• Once she made that mistake, it quickly became clear how really, really dangerous it is to be slightly rubbish in front of the wrong audience. Once, it was possible to make mistakes at a geek gathering and recover. I’ve seen far worse than Lacy’s performance pass unnoticed. Conference hosts and speakers who were patently unprepared and/or drunk. Genuinely shocking presentations (one, memorably, invoking the memory of Ghandi to sell rubbish mobile phones – buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about it sometime) and the accidental spilling of company secrets which would – had they left the room – got people fired. Now, all the audience is always on – Twittering away, with a blog to fire off on at length later, interconnected to the nth degree with everyone else in the room, and everyone who gives a damn in the rest of the world, shielded by – if not anonymity – enough distance not to be actually, physically, banjoed by the person they’re insulting. Thusly, and uninhibited, vast waves of geek ire roll out across the ether at the speed of light.

• Finally, a little self-loathing: we conference-guzzling, globetrotting massively digitally connected geek blogextroverts are cocks. I mean – really. We’re writing long essays all over the webs about a BusinessWeek hack of limited renown interviewing – poorly, but not criminally badly – a techie of massive potential wealth but non-scaling personality (or, by the sounds of things, insight. This happens – genius people manage to crank out one brilliant thing but don’t have much more to say or, in the end, do). We could focus our efforts on stuff that matters, and leave the poor Sarah to slowly realise her sucky stage skills are neither Alpha, nor Omega, nor even really yesterday’s news. Is this – really and truly – the most significant thing to come out of SXSW? If it is, no business should send anyone to this gathering again.

All hail the new star on the block. It makes CNET and Wired look woolly and staid (if you even read them any more) and frankly there’s not much like it on this side of the pond. Nick Denton’s Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag, is flying at the moment, finding its voice and building a reputation in tenacious all-sides-covered reporting on Yahoo/Microsoft. Its stats, above, show the strong growth you’d expect of a rising star.

What I find most interesting is how the blog combines news reporting with analysis with satire with too-much-detail-insiderishness, without missing a beat, and managing to get the choice right most of the time. It’s a trick many mainstream media hacks struggle to pull off even after years of practice, and some would even say they don’t have license to do it from cautious editors. But I suspect it’s what this emerging form of blog journalism is all about.

[Later: lest I be accused of being a hopeless fanboy, especially since Valleywag linked to this post overnight, there is an interesting point from a reader, in the comments below, about Valleywag's accuracy, and its savage attacks on people who may not, actually, be public figures. I'd be interested to hear more from people who have more of an inside track on what the site reports - and, indeed, any response from the site's writers and editors.]

Some recent examples of the site’s range, pulled from the RSS feed… exclusive screenshots of an unlaunched Yahoo! service (“The pace of of product launches from Yahoo is breathless — and with a whiff of desperation”) that had, at time of writing this, 1732 Diggs. Or this vicious excoriation of Yahoo’s policy towards click fraud – a piece that wouldn’t look out of place in Britain’s Private Eye , if the Eye covered tech in any sensible way (Valleywaggers can be even more nasty towards individuals they don’t like, in a way that would garner a libel suit in the UK pretty quickly. No, I’m not linking to an example, but if you look through its savage profiles of some of the Yahoo layoffs you’ll see what I mean). Or this interesting bit of news analysis on Apple’s problems in China, where there are 400,000 iPhones running unlocked on China Mobile.

One voice, a range of styles. Also interesting (and worrying) for established journalism: they freely admit to getting things wrong in the race to be first with stuff. Perhaps the most famous example was last summer’s false claim that a drunk datacentre employee had blacked out “all of the websites you care about”. They were put right, and ‘fessed up quickly – “Drunk editor kills the gossip item you care about” – and seem to have been forgiven by most readers.

Maybe it’s because it portrays itself as a scrappy little outlet, where 100% accuracy is less important than entertainment and attitude. Maybe it’s because readers don’t mind so long as you get it right eventually. Maybe it’s a challenge to old-fashioned journalism, maybe it’ll all end in tears.

It’ll be interesting to watch. For now, loving their work, in a I-think-this-might-be-significant sort of way.

I craved the flexiblity and control of doing my own thing, away from Typepad, but switching these things is never easy, even when you own your own domain. WordPress uses a different URL structure to Typepad, and there’s no easy way to make the two tally – so bye, bye Googlerank. You only supplied me with irrelevant traffic anyway, really.

More serious is the likely irritation I’ll cause long-standing readers who first subscribed to my old RSS feed. I moved to Feedburner earlier in the year, so newer readers shouldn’t see any problem. But to those of you forced to come to the front page to find out what’s going on: sorry. I know, I’ve broken the web. Here’s the new (Feedburner) feed URL.

On the plus side: well, I get shiny new tools. You probably don’t care. In a sop to you, I think the new design’s easier to read, too, especially on PCs. And it should all run a bit faster, and more reliably. But you may disagree. Comments are very welcome.

Instead, the WI have proposed a new Bloggers’ Code of Conduct. It includes a bar on being “disagreeable” and urges bloggers to take their differences… offline. They even want to appoint intermediaries when bloggers really disagree. Good grief. Predictably, there’s been a rather juvenile response from some to this overblown request for civility. But if, by some weird chance, it was actually adopted, things would be about to get very dull, very quickly, kids. As Jeff Jarvis is saying, I’ll be disagreeable if I want to be. Let’s make a badge for that and slap it on wur blogs.

Seriously, my biggest fear is this kind of stuff tars a huge group of people with a rather nasty brush – “you blog, therefore you are a misogynist”, for instance. That’s the kind of thing that gets repeated in a million newspaper stories, puts people off reading or joining in, and just begs trade bodies and legislators in to have a look around before taking some horrifically misguided action. There’s probably a bureaucrat with a pen twitching in Brussels right now.

Such action, and indeed this code, is entirely unnecessary. Why? Just think what this code implies:

• that blogs, as a genre determined only by shared design characteristics and a kind of content management system, require self-regulation in a way that’s a bit like mass media (newspapers, TV, radio, advertising) but in a way not seen among users of email, MySpace, Bebo, talkboards, instant messaging, Usenet (yes – you!) or the telephone.

• that bloggers breaking basic rules of decency – even the law – are common enough that blog readers want to see some kind of decency kitemark – “golly gosh – I keep coming across these snarky, abusive, threatening blogs! I wish there was some kind of ‘safe blog’ ring!”. This isn’t my experience; most blogs don’t seek an audience beyond friends and family.

• that, despite all those, those bloggers who are unable to understand society’s views on their gross behaviour are somehow still aware enough to spot they should sign up for a code of conduct that, in the main, only repeats those obligations. And that then they’ll suddenly want to behave better.

• that, for the truly dumb, or twisted, or dangerous, there are not perfectly good laws and conventions designed to deal with everything from sexist abuse to death threats, from the promise of social exclusion and loss of attention right through to the threat of court and the clink. Not to mention employment contracts that insist their employees don’t bring the organisations they work for into disrepute.

My question: why even start drawing up a new code when there’s so much in the real world that should – and does, in really meaningful ways – regulate what you say? Because, after all, any online presence is just a layer on top of the rest of your life, not something that exists outside or apart from it (no matter what those crafty Second Life marketeeers tell you, kids).

Are there any bloggers for whom this list doesn’t already apply?

Maybe he’s right. And, personally, I’m delighted he’s talking about CiF on telegraph.co.uk – given it’s Britain’s top newspaper website, we should get lots of extra readers (just kidding).

But Shane assumes we were setting out to create something that would appeal to the kind of people who care about the definition of a blog. We weren’t, and didn’t.

We set out to join and foster online conversations with something that resembled a blog, used blog technology and frequently behaved like a blog. CiF is actually 1200 or so blogs, with an aggregated front end, to allow us to include some crowd-pleasing editorial tricks – like editing – and protect columnists from the kind of dead blog syndrome that so hurts the Telegraph and Indie efforts.

The key difference was we took the focus off individuals and redistributed attention between authors, commenters, and the aggregate discussion. Breaking views and strong user debate are the key influences on CiF’s front page, not the article of faith that is the newest-post-first traditional blog form. We think it improves the user experience.

It was a format based on years of blog experimentation, and frustration, at Guardian Unlimited. In particular, the massively group nature of the blog was deliberate; we built in acceptance of the reality that many interesting people simply don’t have time to contribute very regularly. It’s a reality the Telegraph and pretty much every other blogging newspaper continues to ignore.

The new approach was a gamble. But, happily, real users didn’t bat an eyelid when CiF launched, or when we copied the approach for sport and arts. In fact, they seemed to appreciate the thought, as our stats show, and as our internal research confirms.

So maybe Shane’s right. It’s not a blog – not, at least, in the traditional sense, although I’m going to keep calling it that. But in making the argument, he’s missing the point. Having seen the Telegraph’s blog stats, and their levels of interaction, maybe Shane and his colleagues should join us in “not a blog”-ing as soon as possible. Go on – devise a new format that actually works for your readers, and leave the blog dogma behind.

This week’s Press Gazette runs a feature on “the leading voices in journo-blogging” and mysteriously finds space for Completetosh*. It’s an honour – indeed, a bewildering surprise – to find this humble parish included alongside an impressive list of folk I enjoy reading myself.

Others include m’collegues Roy Greenslade and Kevin Anderson (with fiance Suw Charman) , Andrew Grant-Adamson, Adrian Monck, Robin Hamman, Richard Sambrook, the anonymous Vickywatch blog, Paul Bradshaw, Seamus McCauley, Shane Richmond, Andy Dickinson and Richard Burton.

Regular readers may be entertained, or nod with weary recognition, at Graham Hollliday’s analysis of this organ’s content.

“In between talking about his woeful experience with a Philips TV, his cat’s weed habit and Swindon Town football club, Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at Guardian Unlimited, blogs about journalism and new and old media. In 2005 McIntosh famously (well, famous in blogworld) said, “Mainstream media trying to do blogs is like watching a vicar disco dance“.

New readers may wish to click on the links to fully understand what’s being alluded to. No, I wasn’t referring to the Guardian’s blogs when I said that. And no – it’s not really weed. Not that weed.

Later: Robin Hamman correctly calls the whole thing for the cabal it is.

* Traditional blog form following such an honour is to attempt a blog post mixing an air of surprise with bewilderment, seasoned with appropriate self-depreciation. This is to mask some sounds; the popping of corks, the slapping of high-fives, and the scraping of celebratory moonwalks. I be bigginitup, large like, really.