“There is a nasty little scrap
happening on the internet between the forces of the political Left and
Right – and the Right seems to be winning,” Malcolm Farr wrote last week. “That’s what any standard capacity, culturally attuned laugh meter would show.”

He was talking about the blogosphere:

This
cyber battle is important because it demonstrates the
emerging significance here of web logs (blogs) in national and
international political debate. Perhaps more important, it shows how
the Australian Left, or at least those members who blog, has become a
bunch of whining, humourless, self-absorbed bores…

The Yippies
sniggered Richard Nixon out of the White House and here every Tory
leader since Billy McMahon has had the Left – and many others – rolling
in the aisles.

But these days, put the letters www before a despatch from the Left and the humour factor drops to negative.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the Right is correct and morally superior, or that the Left is behind and lacking scruples.

It does mean Right-wing blogs are more fun to read and thus their messages are more frequently seen by non-combatants.

A few seconds on Google’s Blogsearch
will let you see some of the feedback he generated on various blogs.
Amazingly, though, the bloggers seem to have missed the most important
point of Farr’s article. True, Professor Bunyip is funnier than Webdiary. And, yes, Wonkette shows that the Left can laugh – in the US, at least.

But
what is really significant here is that a journalist like Farr is
bothering with the blogs – that he clearly knows his way around them –
and is talking about them in his newspaper.

Dot commers used to be obsessed with new paradigms. You’d think they might notice one when it comes along.