About today

February 25, 2009 at 7:52 pm | Posted in Blogging about blogging | 4 Comments

Loathe as I am to disprove the rule that bloggers are armed with opinions about everything, I’m not quite sure what to say about this apart from some banality like “oh my!” or “that’s a turn up for the books”. I should really never write anything without an encyclopedia of cliches…

People blog about politics for any number of reasons. Some use it as a chance to vent; others as a chance to debate. Some like to specialise in one specific area; others offer a more general commentary. Some proselytize for their party, their ideology, their faith or their atheism. Some scrutinise the tabloids, some interpret the world through academia, and some type pithy, witty put-downs to those who deserve a good fisking. Even now I’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

But where blogs might differ in their motivations, ideology, tone and voice, the one unifying thread which runs through this huge, diffuse blogsophere is that they’re all written by people who believe this country can be made better than it is today. In an age which is supposed to be more apathetic than those which have gone before, that’s something pretty special.

For that reason, no matter how many links they recieve, how many hits they boast or whether or not they’re nominated for a prize, all of them – regardless of party or creed – are of great value to our understanding of the world, and of each other.

So just for the record, the submissions I made for the Orwell Prize can be found here, but before you do that, I’d ask anyone with an interest in entering the kingdom of blogs to first read the other submissions, especially by those writers you haven’t heard of or think you won’t agree with. And once you’ve done that, perhaps you might want to check out what else is out there. It will be worth your time.

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