So approximately 15 thousand pieces of silver are what it would take for a man to swing willingly from the Judas Tree.

I imagine that getting rid of the various administrative headaches of running his own site, with the added sweetener of News Ltd paying for the moderation eyeballs as well, would be a bonus hard to go past even if they were only paying him a lesser pittance for the actual blogging.

So approximately 15 thousand pieces of silver are what it would take for a man to swing willingly from the Judas Tree.

Seems rather paltry.

Or was it like one of those Hollywood teen movies in which the healthy Alpha-male types had all the grrls and the fun, but somehow (in the eyes of the writer, at least) the geek miraculously got the grrl in the finish … (until he woke up)?

Seems the readers ther are not too impressed with his efforts so far.

Being reading Yeats lately, Nabokov?

Nice thoughts about Blair’s move, btw.

“Well I certainly don’t know him that well - even though I am him.”

Can relate to that.

Are we not just eventually all pebbles rolled and rattled around an electronic beach by the ebbing and flowing yet ever rising tides of the noosphere?

I’m not!

Ssssh, careful they might hear you

Well I certainly don’t know him that well - even though I am him.

I’m surprised people didn’t see this coming. Tim B has been a hard-nosed and very professional journo first and foremost. (You’ll notice Blair at Spleenville never ever got close to being pinged for defamation despite apparent appearances to the contrary and he’s generally issued brisk and timely corrections when he got it wrong.) He’s always been thinking and operating as a media pro with his eye on the next move.

Now News Corp has offered him the holy grail of blogging - express your shorter sharper blog-shaped opinions on company time and get paid for it too. Probably an extra 15k a year, which I certainly wouldn’t sneeze at.

And like Tim Dunlop he’s attracting the kind of criticism that implicitly implies people outside his regular gang will get to join in without having the right to do so.

Bloggers and their commentators across the spectrum are always talking up how blogging will deliver more and /or replace the MSM. But the moment a blogging identity gets a MSM outlet (with comment threads open to the uninitiated) it’s all Shock! Horror! There goes the Neighbourhood!

It’s not selling out to the MSM, it’s the MSM buying in.

Besides it’ll do Tim B’s regulars a world of good to get out of that sheltered commentshop.

And how quickly some of his most dedicated have turned on him. Also interesting to see the paranoia of some of his clan over the fact news.com.au blogs keep logs of IDs and internet addresses, just in case the moderators miss something that results in defamation claims.

Blair will have to work hard to separate himself from Bolt, considering they both usually post on much the same subjects and already shared a few thousand readers. The online conservative audience in Australia who follow blogs aren’t numerous enough for both of them to get the hundreds of thousands of hits a month that makes Rupert smile if Blair continues to group thinks with Bolt as often as he’s done in the past.

Blair will likely find a big audience if he ramps up the humour. There’s not exactly a lot of funny conservatives in Australia. Intentionally funny, that is.

Hey! you & the Pope would get on marvellously…well, at least you could understand each other. I imagine Bob Carr would also dig a chat. No sarcasm or envy meant. I know there are those who feel more relaxed at Church listening to services in Latin…nostalgia, sense of belonging & such. But for some reason it gives me the creeps. Vēnī, vīdī, vīcī & all that. Genetic memory perhaps…:)

no accounting for taste…as you say….sorta.

And reading the thread at Blair’s they understand that distinction very well indeed.

One can certainly have a view about what constitutes good or bad blogging. But it’s all blogging and my personal bias is to describe it rather than assess it.

At any rate, the winged monkeys are still free to express their “thoughts”. But without their arch-enabler (I mean Andrea Harris), I doubt whether they’ll have any. Much less any that see the light of day. And, to wax normative for a moment, I am glad for it.

Just on the Tim Dunlop thing, I may not have made it clear enough but I was trying to leave enough nuance in my comments about News Ltd blogs to capture a somewhat different approach to the form from Tim Dunlop. Tim has certainly tried to take some of the community/interaction stuff with him, but I think he’s been to some degree hampered by the same sorts of MSM gatekeeping I’ve written about. Tim Blair, by contrast, never interacted much in his own comments threads. You were far more likely to see Timmeh pop up from time to time on other blogs. So Timmeh, to me, sorta lived off the community his blog created rather than with and for it.

And if you read through, a big sense of loss.

Yes Mark. It’s a bad day for connoisseurs of toxic drivel, infantile abuse, and mental flatulence.

Blair’s blog was the online equivalent of a bunch of pig-rootin’, sister-lovin’ good ol’ boys getting together to suck down some hooch, git riled up, jerk each other off and then find themselves a fag to bash.

Good riddance.

5) Don’t drink to the point you become a delusional paranoid.

De gustibus non est disputandum, Nasking.