Good Grief! This article in the Guardian about blogs isn’t half bad. OK, so he doesn’t tell us who actually did the heavy lifting (Bill, Charles, Powerline) and he’s not 100% correct about what was actually found, there was more about kerning and so on, but:

Easongate, as it has
inevitably become known, is an echo of last autumn’s Rathergate
scandal. Dan Rather, the anchor of CBS’s evening news, was as big as TV
stars come. Rather had fronted an attack on George Bush’s Vietnam-era
military service record – based on forged documents. The forgery was
exposed when bloggers focused on a superscripted "th" after a date in
one of the documents. Experts confirmed that typewriters of the period
could not have produced such lettering. Rather apologised and CBS is
now desperately searching for someone else in whom viewers might put
their trust.

That’s a reasonable enough description, in shorthand, of what went on. This also sounds about right:

You would also expect
this electronic revolution to be good for the Democrats, but the
American left’s relationship with the internet has been disastrous. The
internet has sunk a knife into Bill Clinton’s moderate Democratic
party. Mainstream business people were Clinton’s principal funders,
simultaneously approving and driving his centrism. But the Democrats’
new paymasters are the 600,000 computer users who, in 2004, supported
Howard Dean’s bid for his party’s presidential nomination. Dean
energised an unrepresentative group of voters with a stridently
anti-war message. Electronic money powered Dean’s campaign, and all of
the other contenders for the Democratic crown soon pandered to his
base.

The
Democrats’ problem has only worsened since. The dailykos.com site of a
Democratic consultant gets 500,000 hits a day. That site’s memorial to
four American contractors murdered in Iraq was "screw them".
Hatefulness also pours out of the popular websites of Michael Moore and
MoveOn.org. The conservative blogosphere has dubbed the Democrats’ IT
base its MooreOn tendency.

In predicting the future he may be on shakier ground…it won’t necessarily be this way but we can hope that it will be:

All this should put
the fear of God into the metropolitan elites. For years there have been
widening gaps between the governing class and the governed and between
the publicly funded broadcasters and the broadcasted to.

Until
now voters, viewers and service users have not had easy mechanisms by
which to expose officialdom’s errors and inefficiencies. But, because
of the internet, the masses beyond the metropolitan fringe will soon be
on the move. They will expose the lazy journalists who reduce every
important public policy issue to how it affects opinion-poll ratings.

Tired
of being spoon-fed their politics, British voters will soon be calling
virtual town hall meetings, and they will take a serious look at the
messenger as well as the message. It’s going to be very rough.

There is a certain sadness about this article, for it does look as if this previously senior politician has got it, grasped what the new medium offers. But there is exactly the rub, he was previously the leader of the Conservative Party, is now the ex-Leader of the Opposition. As such he is persona non-gratia anywhere in polite metropolitan circles, and he will simply not be listened to.

There are a number of grass roots adventures being tried in the UK political scene and whether they will be successful or not remains to be seen. Certainly the situation is nowhere near as advanced as that in the US. Without attempting to be inclusive (simply not possible, no one can actually know everything that is going on) I can point to a number of as yet small scale political movements organising on the net. Starting with the serious, there’s the Campaign for an English Parliament, a group devoted to overturning the newly imposed disadvantages that England has under the devolved constitution…as an example of how slowly things can sometimes move here the situation was first pointed out by Tam Dalyell 30 years ago, under the name the West Lothian Question. Neil Herron, starting as a campaigner against compulsory metrication and recently running a successful campaign against regional (as opposed to countrywide) devolution. Richard North and Helen Szamuely at EU Referendum, providing a constant stream of articles and invective on the upcoming new European Union Constitution.

No look at the British blogosphere would be complete without mentioning  Harry’s Place and Normblog, both doing sterling work parrying the idiot parts of the left from a rational leftist perspective, The Daily Ablution, fact checking the house organs of that very metropolitan elite, Biased BBC, exposing media spin, Shot by Both Sides (rarely agree with him but he is good).

Yes, yes, I’ve left out hundreds if not thousands of people and places but that’s simply the nature of the beast, an explosion of voices screaming out, "Listen to me!" and some of them will get listened to if the consumers, that is, the average chap in the street (or more likely, the average chap with a modem) likes what is said, if the specific monomania being put forward strikes said chappess as reasonable.

At the distinctly less serious end of the process we get places like this blog, where we enjoy  google bombing  the Deputy Prime Minister,   refer to the ex-Foreign Secretary and now Guardian columnist, Robin Cook, as the red bearded dwarf, take the mickey out of the Vice President of the European Commission and her blog, in general, shout and scream at the things we don’t like and, in contrast to the more serious players, offer few alternatives….one piece got picked up by the national press but that’s not enough to change the terms of the debate.

So far it’s really only Neil Herron as above who can claim to have actually changed the political landscape. But who knows what will happen in the future, as more people come aboard?