Well, yes, this might be biting the hands that feed a little but still, Michael Gove is a little, how shall we put it, over the top here I feel?

What makes Daniel and Iain so successful

Daniel, excellent and wonderful man that he is (you did know that he’s the Comments Page editor of the Times? That I desire to write more often for that newspaper? That I am in fact  willing to pander to Finkelstein’s (pbuh) every whim in order to do so?)  has been blogging since, errr, Friday. 6 days inclusive. I’d, in the most ’umble Heepish manner, suggest that that might not be quite long enough to judge "success"?

His online diary had almost 150,000 visitors last month, which gives him a readership in the UK more comprehensive than, say, The Economist.

Errr, no. Iain is indeed a successful blogger but not even his advertising agency would claim that he has an audience of 150,000 separate people. 150,000 visits, yes, but not visitors. Would we say that the Bath Evening Chronic (to take at near random a local newspaper) has 300,000 readers because, over a month it sells 10,000 copies a day? As blogs, successful, often updated ones, might be checked several times a day by the same reader, 150,000 visits a month might mean anything from two or three thousand checking religiously to say 15,000 more occasional readers.

Impressive numbers for one person to command, certainly, but not comparable to magazine or newspaper circulation numbers.

The original idea behind blogs, or weblogs as they were originally
christened and no one now calls them, was that they should be virtual
commonplace books, online Christmas crackers, logging the best of what
was on the web every day, just as John Julius Norwich assembles the
best of what he’s read for the delight of his friends every year. What
makes the best commonplace books, or blogs, special is the editors’
personality and skill in selecting just the right mix to inform and
entertain.

Now what blogs "ought to be" or the "original idea" has very little meaning. As there has been and is no central governing authority, the very concept doesn’t actually make sense. They’re simply a method for people to communicate and each and every person who uses the technology uses it in his own way.

Having said that, I agree, absolutely, that some very good blogs are in fact exactly that. Commonplace books, not diaries. In fact, that’s exactly what I said in a short talk at the Pepys Festival (??) in Cambridge a few months back. Was Gove there and I didn’t notice him?