[guido] the rich get richer and the poor …

It all began, as far as I can see, with this attack by Tim [the manic] Ireland, giving a point by point account as to why Guido Fawkes should be struck off. Countless other bloggers got in on the act. Then Paul Linford weighed in with this:

Keen observers may have noticed that, with the possible exceptions of UK Daily Pundit and myself, the debate is thus far polarising on political lines....

That may well be so but I don’t consider myself to be particularly left wing and Guido’s account of the tiff:

Skip this if you have a low boredom threshold, because it is for the geeks. Guido himself is basically simultaneously bored by, but amused that the blog boycott / de-link call has so spectacularly badly backfired, with hits up again to a new month and year high at 2,345,463 page views yesterday … so it looks like it is over and normal service can resume. So, for old times sake and just to wind Blog Brother up one last time, here are yesterday's stats. On Day 2 of the link boycott, Blog Brother himself slipped from fifth to sixth ranked link referrer…

… does not fill me with love for the man. Some time back, on someone’s blog, Guido’s alter ego commented and I commented under it, supporting what I thought were his essentially correct remarks. I’m not ‘naturally’ anti-Guido. But I am anti-bignoters who crow about their stats and for whom it’s the only purpose of blogging.

I have just been through his blog [thereby contributing, in a miniscule way, to his already swollen stats] and I’ve come to a conclusion I hope is not jaundiced:

He may have once been a good blogger. Who knows? He’s not anywhere near the blogger Iain Dale is now. Whatever one says about Iain, his posts are well-written and are not constantly self-referential [not constantly were the words]. In other words, he delivers product. Plus there’s Doughty. Doughty can’t be ignored, it is heavily influential and well put together.

Iain Dale contributes to the blogosphere in other ways too. He’s forever analysing it, creating lists and running drinks evenings for bloggers of a certain bent. Which is where Guido comes back in because he was one half of the latter event and all credit to him.

In the end, for the life of me I can’t see what 2,345,463 people see in his blog and why he wields such enormous influence. I can name eight to ten blogs immediately which are better and that was the primary purpose behind Blogpower. To give the top blogger [without the readership] a small chance.

I have no personal beef with Guido. It’s just a Dr. Fell situation, really.