Readership figures for political blogs are secret – especially the further you go into the furthest flung corners of the blogosphere. In fact, apart from the very top bloggers, everyone else is mostly silent about their readership figures.

That’s because the fall-off in readership from the top 2 blogs to even the 5th most popular blog is huge. It’s ‘distribution of wealth around the world’ types of curves, and that makes Guido & Iain the sort of Bill and Melissa Gates of blogging.

It seems barely credible to talk about a political blogging phenomenon so much as Iain Dale and Paul Staines just happen to run very successful websites that just happen to be blogs that just happen to be in a genre that’s normally very, very niche.

Let’s get some numbers out there to put things in perspective:

Guido got 300,000 absolute unique visitors this month (let’s call this ’100%’ of the political blog readership.) That’s with the help of television and the press and being a huge story himself.

Lib Dem Voice, the top Liberal Democrat blog, got 30,000 absolute unique visitors (10% of Guido’s readership) this month, and this is the biggest Lib Dem blog.  That’s already a huge drop off. According to Wikio, Lib Dem Voice is the 6th most influential political blog.

This first month for charlottegore.com…. deep breath…. I got 4,250 absolute unique visitors (a teeny bit over 1.41% of Guido’s readership, or over 14.1% of the Lib Dem Voice’s readership). Those 4,250 visited 22,182 times between them. Hardcore!

I have no idea how this compares to other lib dem bloggers – I suspect that if you were to line us all up in terms of traffic I’d be in the top 10, I believe – but I’d be extremely worried about the state of the Lib Dem blogosphere as a whole if I was in the top 5.

What does all this mean though? What does it say about this ‘industry’ of political blogging. I think it means the vast majority of people reading political blogs are only reading one or two political blogs – Iain and/or Guido – the names mentioned on television and the newspapers. The further away from these two blogs people are: (one click? two clicks? three clicks? six clicks?) The number of readers drops off sharply with every click, requiring individuals to be a lot more determined to find and seek out interesting content.

This is why I don’t get, “ughhhg!! LUBDUMBS R stp00p1d LOLZZZLL!!!111″ type comments. Long may that continue.

So I think all in all I’m doing better than I probably should be (even if I’m probably not doing as well as people imagined), and that the people who visit this blog are as tenacious, stubborn and obsessed by politics as I am. Probably not as obsessed about the minutea of the blogosphere itself though… I really should ban myself from these ‘shop talk’ posts.

The blogosphere has decended upon itself talking about very little other than the blogosphere itself – and I’m talking about me talking about the blogosphere talking about the blogosphere! Whole new level, baby!

I’m beginning to think poor Sunny’s feeling rather left out of the whole “Smeargate” scandal, so has decided to troll the whole blogosphere with this piece accusing blogs of promoting degradation of politics and destroying civility. 

The title? “Blogging will only increase the sleaze – unless we stop it.”

Apparently continuing to expose sleaze and scandals benefits anti-politics types, reduces trust in politicians and, therefore, reduces trust in the state – which is the opposite of what Sunny wants. He implores to ignore this non-story and rise above the fray….

…Except the blogs are exposing politicians to a level of scrutiny that they’d not had to face before. Because blogs do not depend on access to politicians, they can say what they like. These scandals were simply a matter of time, and until politicians realise that their world has changed, that the only way to ‘stop Guido’ is to give him nothing to write about, this is only going to get worse. The idea that ‘the Left’ should get together to protect politicians from anti-politics types and libertarians? Oh sweet christ. You have fallen from the Zeitgeist tree, haven’t you Sunny?

It’s not bloggers generating the sleaze – it’s the politicians. Well, sort of… 

Sunny, editor of Liberal Conspiracy, writes:

The British left, I think, has to take heed from the American leftwing blogosphere. They didn’t set up their own smear sites and spend all their times ranting like the rightwingers (Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, Faux News etc) – because they knew that it would lead to an even more degradation of politics.

Which is great, but then two stories after this one he publishes this nasty piece of crap that repeats smears against ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries on the grounds that ‘these rumours have been doing the rounds for months’. 

And the title of that particular blog post? “Hypocrisy Rules Ok”

Yes. Yes it does. 

And then it gets worse, with a progressive and friendly form of comment censorship:

Y dts

Why th HLL d y llw pltcs t rn vry spct f yr lvs?

Why th HLL d 60,000,000 ppl d s thy r tld by mr 646 cllss dts?

Wht r y frghtnd f? Lsng yr Nctr pnts?

Y gt N lf. Lv t s Y wnt, nt hw Rth Klly r nn Wddcmb thnks y shld. Thy nd p n th sm plc s y nywy. Rttng n grv. nd lng tm dd.

Those open minded, pro-free speech liberals over at Liberal Conspiracy haven’t deleted comments. They don’t want to delete comments, because that might make them look like illiberal authoritarians. This way is much nicer. 

So yes, Liberal Conspiracy is having a bad couple of days (although good in a ‘getting attention’ sort of way, which I suppose is the point).

Put better than I ever could over on the ASI blog, Poverty, Equality and Hope.

Blogging isn’t exactly as prolific as I’d like (10 posts a day of around 2,000 words). Sadly am being chased by a rather angry deadline (one that breathes fire and snarls, a sort of deadliney Balrog) and am afflicted with a brain prone to easy distractability.

Twittering is going well (except for destroying my career, obviously) . Have tweaked the Haiku rule so that it doesn’t include replies – that would just suck up my entire life.

The test is whether or not I can actually put a bit of poetry in these little poems after I’ve had lots of practice doing it. If I can write something as punchy as this:

Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave

…I will consider myself to have found a legitimate excuse for Twitter for a curmudgeon like me.

Ah, another DIY Poster Meme, this one allowing you to mock the Government’s latest propaganda. Jennie Rigg’s rounded up some links so I’ll link to her. My own contribution..

On the subject of photoshop, I unearthed this mind-melting little morsel of pixelly joy (sadly uncredited):

Finally, I am experimenting with having some kind of ‘media grid.’ My peak time for writing is in the evenings, but the peak time for reading is during the day. The simple wheeze is to not to publish stories immediately after writing. It even gives me a chance to proof read stuff. Interesting this ‘thinking about stuff’ business.

Libdemblogs.co.uk is an aggregator site, taking feeds from most Lib Dem blogs (currently 213 of them) and displaying extracts of posts in reverse chronological order.  It is very capably maintained by Ryan Cullen, who responds to emails quickly and deserves ‘props’ (whatever they are) for his efforts.

It’s what makes the Lib Dem Blogosphere different. Other bloggers are dependent on reciprocal links, and so established bloggers become the gatekeepers of what does and does not ‘make it’. New bloggers can get themselves added to libdemblogs and suddenly have access to a large readership, and so because of this it seems normal for blogs to seemingly rise out of nowhere to become regular reads.

So what’s the problem?

The downside to Lib Dem Blogs is that many Lib Dem Bloggers – and other bloggers – choose to link back to libdemblogs rather than create their own blogroll. It’s very tempting: Why link to a specific lib dem blog when you can link to libdemblogs and catch them all in one go? No-one’s offended, no-one’s upset they’ve been left out – politicially it’s smart. But in terms of letting the LD Blogosphere compete with the Tory and Libertarian blogosphere, it’s working against us.

We want LD blogs to compete properly with the rest, we’re going to have to start telling Google and Wikio, “Hey, Google, Wikio: I like this blog. This blog is good!” because, if we don’t, Google and Wikio will presume no-one, in fact, likes that blog. No-one thinks that blog is good.

We tell ‘the internet’ that we like a blog by linking to it. It’s that simple.

Of the top 5 Lib Dems on Wikio on the Wikio rankings – Lib Dem Voice, Peter Black AM, Quaequam Blog!, People’s Republic and the Yorksher Gob only Peter Black links to individual lib dem blogs. James Graham’s Quaequam Blog features a feed widget (or a feejit) of libdemblogs but then only links to blogs affliated with other parties (or none at all).

How did these blogs get their position in the Wikio rankings? Simple: By being linked to by others.

So, I’m laying down the gauntlet here, and I’m asking Lib Dem bloggers – if they haven’t already – to create their own blogrolls. Link to the blogs you read, you admire and you enjoy.  Ask them to link back to you.

Let’s get back to basics and begin linking to each other, rather than depending exclusively on a hub.

What are the benefits? For starters you’ll be helping drive traffic to sites you like, and that means that more people will get to read what they have to say.   In turn, this will increase traffic to the the LD Blogosphere as a whole. This is a good thing, because it means our message (whatever that might be) is more widely read.

Second, and crucially, Wikio Rankings depend on the number of links, and presumably the ranking of the site doing the linking. The higher up the rankings you are,  the more ‘good’ you do – for the LD blogging community – when you link out. If you just link to libdemblogs then the only site that benefits is libdemblogs.

Example: Say “Blog X” has gone from tiny to extremely popular – it gets readers from across the political spectrum, way beyond the usual crowd of LD bloggers, but it doesn’t link to any other blogs. People visit it, but then they have a dead end. Imagine it’s someone who’s never even considered looking at the Lib Dem Blogosphere before – do we want them to simply walk away, or do we want to offer them more: Hey, like this? Then why not try this?

So that’s my message for today. If, when you’re creating your shiny new blogroll you happen to include this blog, please do let me know and I’ll link you back in return (assuming I don’t already).