“My Right to Force You to Be Interested in Politics,” In which I commend blogging, and demand an ASBO for on fifth of the adult population.

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I’d also point out that RSS, trackback, and comments are a cause of the decline in the importance of the blogroll. Where once you would have a list of blogs you read, now you add RSS feeds to your reader, and/or trackback them (or leave extensive comments). This is a natural evolution towards a more dynamic/live web community rather than just collecting masses of links. (Although, that said, my own blogroll and RSS feed are in a shocking state at the moment.)

I experimented during 2004 with replacing the blogroll by an “RSSroll”, dumping the feeds from key blogs on my right sidebar in the old blogroll spot, but abandoned the experiment due to the flakiness of the hosted RSS panel (when it wasn’t offline and hence breaking the sidebar, it constantly failed to render long titles correctly).

In a broader sense, may I mourn the passing of SBBS? For good or ill, it did act as a sort of peering interface between the main British blogclans, being the only place where Tony’s Willing Executioners and the Student Stoppers paths crossed in something like good spirits.

I think all bloggers share something in common, in that they care enough and are engaged enough in one or more issues to write about it and thus is some small way (at least) campaign to try to change the way it is treated – which is always going to make them a clique to some degree.

But I wonder why this has to be the “British” blogosphere? I haven’t counted my blogroll, but it is probably well over the 300 mark, and maybe 20-30 per cent of those are British, about 50 per cent American (because there are an awful lot of them in the blogosphere), 10 per cent Australian (because I do still have some interest in the old place), and the rest from everywhere from Jordan to India to Latin America.

And while I post often on history and culture, I do also post a lot on politics, and I find that the international perspective can throw up all sorts of interesting new ideas and perspectives. A recent post on menstruation, which was partly history and partly contemporary political comment, drew a huge response from the Indian blogosphere for example, which wasn’t what I was expecting when I wrote it.

But in researching the Britblog roundup – via one original nomination, I also found a whole circle of new British bloggers – mostly Midlands-based – of whom I was unaware. So I’d urge everyone that if they make one new link, follow it up and find where it leads.

That line could probably have been clearer. Put it this way: if you give me the phrase “The battle for the trees” I can tell you who wrote the book and quote several lines of the song. What we’re short of, it seems to me, are people who would take that for granted and could also tell you where and when the BFTT actually was. (Or, preferably, people who would take that for granted and could also tell you what’s going on now.)

Actually, the rather circular and insular nature of the ‘sphere’ does bother me a little, but not overtly. I found some new blogs recently, some of them got blogrolled even, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with the links I’ve got, because they’re the on-topic blogs I read.

Oh yeah; on the ‘tree hugging hippy’ comments; I’m vegetarian, Paul’s vegan, but while it’s important to both of us personally, we don’t talk about it on the blog, because the blog, in theory, has a topic and a theme. Some blogs out there have great content, but aren’t related to what we’re discussing; they’re on my feed list, but not the blogroll. Meh. Navel gazing, irrelevent, but a good post NM.

OK, we need a good argument on stuff we disagree on; DK’s doing good with his stuff on the BNP and the EU. Maybe I should join him given I mostly disagree with him. Thing is, we enjoy the debate too much to start flaming properly, it’s part of the appeal.