Interwebnet Election Round Up

The BBC's Alan Conner has writen his e-Election round up.
Begin the media commentary on the media commentary on the...
Here's mine:

The Good

"Weblogs provide a medium where politicians, commentators and voters are on a more equal footing: without the restrictions of mainstream media, you stand or fall on how well you communicate."

I'm no expert but this seems right and proper to me. I do hope my MP, Anne Begg, keeps up her blog now that she has been re-elected. No updates since 1st May. And I left a nice comment on the 7th May which hasn't received a response as yet. Come on Anne, where are you?

The Bad

And it would be heart-warming if this were the last election where "cyber squatting" was an official party campaign ruse, rather than limited to its natural home of pressure groups and mischief-makers.

Alan is right, this is no way for a serious political party to behave. That's what we're here for. Joking aside, I have been well and truly hacked off with the negative campaigning.
It only takes 1 in 10 voters... Tories getting in by the back door...
I signed up for the emails and the Labour one's were particularly odious.

The Ugly

And so it is a pity that one of the biggest issues in the blogosphere was, predictably, blogging itself, following a casual but intemperate dismissal of blogs by Mark Lawson in The Guardian.

Two issues here. The first is that the article in question was extremely badly researched. Mr Lawson has an editor and a time frame he must work to and that's not something have any experience of. I like DNA's take on deadlines - I like the noise they make as they go past. I did leave a couple of intemperate comments on other blogs about the article at the time. Now, I think it was probably just a space filling rush job.

The second issue is that I don't recall this being "one of the biggest issues in the blogosphere" during the election. I read quite a number of blogs and a few had something to say about it at the time. In the overall scheme of things, it seemed to be a marginal issue.
It is possible that this was a bigger issue among right wing bloggers. After all, Lawson did seem to have ignored their existence almost entirely. I admit that I don't read that many myself. Does anyone know if they made a big deal of the Lawson article? I can't imagine it's very likely (speculation though, just for fun).

Anyway, I've ended up making the matter even more confusing by refusing to decline to comment on a media comment on a media comment on a media comment on a media comment. Still, the election is over now so it won't be a big issue.