Technorati, the main search engine in the so-called “blogosphere”, now tracks some 27 million sites worldwide. If the numbers are imposing, the way the media regard the humble blogger has changed, too. Britain may lag behind America in technological savvy, but even here journalists are less and less prone to sneer at the laptop-wielding newcomers. The Times now has its own posse of on-line scribblers, and only last week the respected BBC foreign correspondent Paul Reynolds told how he had learnt to treat blogs as a source of information on the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the furore over cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper. As he observed: “The mainstream media (MSM in the jargon) has to sit up and take notice and develop some policies to meet this challenge.”

No wonder bloggers are in an up-beat mood. As one myself, I share their enthusiasm. One reason for me starting my own blog just over a year ago (apart from being an incurable know-it-all) was the desire to explore a form that is fresh and unpredictable and not — yet — the property of an incestuous metropolitan elite. Some of the more quixotic spirits even talk about usurping the MSM altogether. That may be a daydream, but there’s no question that the balance of power has begun to shift.

But dangers lie in wait too, as anyone knows who has dipped into the new media. As ever, America has lessons for the rest of us. When the Democratic Party puts its destiny in the hands of the hyperventilating devotees of the left-wing site The Daily Kos, it wins short-term gains on the fund-raising trail but scares off centrist voters.

The right-wing blogosphere may not seem quite so vulnerable, but it too faces dangers. There is a lot to be said for the forensic work it has performed in the past couple of years. Faced with a complacent liberal media, it has prompted an overdue rethink among editors and reporters who once assumed that their worldview was the only one that mattered.

It would be a shame if the conservative upstarts were to fall into the same trap. It is one thing to say that the mainstream media have got certain stories wrong, quite another to insist that they always get them wrong. But that is the impression that sometimes lingers in the ether.

There were worrying signs of this phenomenon last autumn when rioting broke out in the French banlieues. Within days, much of the blogosphere had declared, from the distance of several thousand miles, that we were witnessing an “intifada”; there was even talk of France being on the verge of civil war. When the wicked MSM failed to go along with this hypothesis — largely because it couldn’t find any evidence — the reaction among some bloggers was to suspect “another MSM cover-up”. The notion that the disturbances might have been linked to unemployment or racial discrimination was dismissed as just one of those sappy liberal myths.

And since conventional wisdom on the blogger Right insists that Europe is economically and demographically doomed, the idea that radical Islam is somehow just years away from seizing power becomes even more seductive. A similarly reductionist approach has tinged some of the coverage of the Mohammed cartoons affair. Hostility to Islamism risks degenerating into casual disdain for Muslims as whole.

Eventually, the “intifada” hysteria did abate. But I was still struck by how fiercely some people wanted to cling to conspiracy theories even when there were few supporting facts. The absence of conventional editorial gate-keeping — one of the great advantages of blogs — also has the effect of creating an echo-chamber effect. Newspapers and TV reporters succumb too, of course, but bloggers are not immune.

One other problem with post-9/11 blogs (I've been guilty of it, too) is an over-sensitivity to criticism of America. It’s an understandable response, given the amount of dimwitted anti-Americanism washing around. Yet it also leads to the temptation to indulge in what Timothy Garton Ash has described as “the hubris of the wounded”, an assumption that any attack on the US is motivated by bad faith, envy or prejudice. In truth, the mind-boggling incompetence of America's diplomatic machine (if I can flatter it with that term) is sometimes the real culprit.

Ultimately, however, I remain optimistic. For one thing, conservative bloggers still tend to be more tolerant of dissent than their left-wing counterparts, many of whom are about as much fun as superannuated members of the Militant Tendency. More importantly, if American bloggers often take a superficial view of Europe (we all sit on street corners begging, apparently) Europeans must take some of the blame. There simply aren’t enough of us out there working the internet. For some reason, the habit still hasn’t fully taken root on this side of the pond. Which means that, unless we rise to the challenge, the stereotypes will only get worse. Pardon my franglais, but the time has come to say “Aux keyboards, citoyens!”

The author can be found at www.clivedavis-online.com

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