The uncertain embers of punditry

The Guardian has gracefully received some top bloggers onto its Comment is Free site. Nosemonkey says:

This, of course, means we must now officially start the chants of "Chicken Yoghurt is a sell out!" and, in a few months' time, start moaning about how "yeah, man, he was, like the shit before he got famous - but now, man, nah... he's lost it", and raving about the next big thing instead... Ho hum, such is life...

It’s not a few months’ time, but anyway.
A context - libraries are good, huh? But there’s the possibility that libraries are not sincere institutions for the free and democratic sharing of all written knowledge. Not at all. Libraries were, from their ancient “mother” in Alexandria onwards, developed to corral and control the anarchic potential of the written word.
The same bipolarity goes for even the best newspapers, because a newspaper is a large public social undertaking, and has to be coherent and in certain dimensions predictable. It will have stockholders, an editorial policy, a hierarchy, reporters, feature writers and columnists, a style guide, a design, advertising, a sales team. It is arguable that in Britain and possibly the world this conglomerate of inputs, intentions and qualities has reached its highest form in The Guardian. Nonetheless, this only makes The Guardian the best newspaper in the world. It does not mean that it is the best source of news and commentary on any given subject ( Marcel Berlins on law, and Matt Seaton on cycling excepted).
Now a blog is, by orders of magnitude, a smaller, simpler kettle of fish. And I’m a typical timewaster in the blog proletariat. I write what I feel like, whether trite or obscure, banal or arcane, and I post pretty photos because the few visitors who drift myblogwards don’t read, they have an attention span of 11 seconds max. (you honourable exceptions, oh ye with the taste and intellect of gods, you know who you are because you are here with me now). Furthermore the design of my blog is crap because, though I’ve changed it a bit from the Blogger template, I haven’t been sufficiently arsed to learn the html to do beautiful things, like for instance the top bit of Chloe’s blog.
But, for all its failings and weaknesses, what it says is mine. I can mix sexual fantasies of the utmost obscenity with pointillist vilification of the Stalinist monster in Guardian colour supplement Welbeing clothing, Anthony Arsehole Blair; I can lie and cheat and swear and satirise, shamelessly mix fact and fiction until all hope of objectivity is lost, and from all this the truth will emerge - not just from me, I mean, from all bloggers - as much or more - more I would say - than from the media, print and broadcast, yes even from the good Guardian itself, with its money and its editorial policy and its style guide and its necessary and overweening self-importance.
And our Premium Division bloggers need to be aware of this. Chicken Yoghurt the blog is brilliant. I go there every day. Compare that with Justin McKeating’s (for Chicken Yoghurt is he) A death in the family .
It seems to me to be the difference between the flair of thought on its first burn, and the uncertain embers of punditry. The reasons for this contrast are clear and structural.
A career structure is emerging in blogging, and that is inevitable. We all recognise the élite, know who the A list are and, if we are honest, we might like to be among them. And a stern warning de bas en haut is never very credible.
I’ll give it nonetheless. Sam Wollaston (yes, The Guardian again) says that those “hundred best” whatever TV programmes, soaps, sitcoms, are known in the trade as “clips’n’cunts shows”. “Clips” are the snippets of “the best actors of all time” or whatever, and “cunts” are the pundits, “the people who yabber on between the clips.”
Blogging is not punditry. We prole bloggers talk largely to ourselves, but in a virtually infinite public arena which shapes our utterances to the way we want to be heard. What we produce is not, on the whole, solipsism. It is a new, mostly hyper-trivial, form of public discourse. It does of course lie along several continua with punditry. One of them is to do with the control exercised by expectations of others. With blogging, the expectation is in the writer’s take on the mind of the chance reader. With punditry, it also has to do with the expectations of the institution, however virtuous, which has graciously received the blogger into its presence. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes: not that I’d refuse them myself, but, unoffered, I recognise them for what they are.