You have to laugh.

I'm late to the party on this one. Others have had their say already. Still, when I went to the original article it was so full of such intense amusement that I just had to read the whole thing.

I write this stuff for fun. I'm paid nothing to do it, it costs me nothing to do it and I don't have any ads here. Total turnover for the blog is zero. I exist in other places too, more of which at some future date, and none of that costs me a penny either. I don't do it for money. I have a day job for that.

You know how much thought and analysis went into this blogging 'business'? Not a scrap. Not one second of consideration other than finding a decent title for the place. What was it going to be about? What were its objectives? No idea, and none. It started with a few loony ramblings I never expected anyone to ever read and just grew from there.

Well, not 'grew'. It's still zero-turnover and it's still loony ramblings but more people read it now. Perhaps it 'spread' more than 'grew'.

What are my objectives now? None. I write what I think of the world, people read it, some agree, some don't and it just goes from there. There is no underlying organisation or defined direction. It's an online version of a pub chat that anyone in the world can join in.

I certainly never planned this blog along the lines of this comment fom the article:

My understanding of Web 2.0 is that essentially it involves setting up conceptual and technological frameworks and portals which provoke or harvest crowdsourcing responses in vast numbers of people. Most organisations then choose to work out how to make money out of these instincts without dismantling the desire people have acquired to continue working for “free” (witness Twitter’s recent deals with Google and Microsoft) – socialism could probably choose to make use of such instincts in the same way or in different ways: in order to raise funds for more traditional campaigning activities or in order to develop the technologies to generate self-sustaining content with an ideological bent and algorithmic dissemination.

I haven't heard language like that since I left the world of corporate meetings, and I still don't know what the hell he's trying to say. At least he didn't use 'paradigm'.

The best I can make out of that is that I think he wants people to work for free and also give him money. If that's the angle, good luck with that!

It's finally clear why Labour perform so poorly in the blog world. They analyse it to death. They pick it apart and hold meetings over the corpse and wonder why it doesn't come back to life when they reassemble it the way they want it. Even though they talk of 'doing things for the social good' and 'getting supporters to work for free' they cannot conceive of doing anything without funding. Nothing can be done unless it's controlled by an agency somewhere. Nothing can possibly happen unless it's funded. Nobody could possibly be doing something just for the fun of it.

Non-labour bloggers are often tagged 'right wing'. That label now means nothing more than 'not Labour'. They have even called the SNP right-wing! So it's nothing to concern yourself with, it means nothing. They rant about the 'right wing blogosphere' as if there really is such a thing. They rail against the 'evil capitalists funding the enemy' as if such capitalists, and such funding, actually exist. I wish! Actually, no, I don't. If I was writing all this under instruction from someone else, I'd hate it.

There is no such thing as a 'right wing blogosphere'. Bloggers are individuals and when you try to control their output you get bland droning within defined and regulated limits. Labour love defined and regulated limits and apply them to everything, along with layers of management, corporate logos, mission statements and central office control. It's not the left wing bloggers who are bland. It's the limitations on what they can say and do that make them so.

Look at Tom Harris, whose Labour blog stays on message but who injects humour now and then and even disagrees with current dogma once in a while. Compare that with the intense Labour focus of LabourList (I can't bring myself to link to it), devoid of humour and where any dissenting voice is a Tory troll. Tom Harris blogs as an individual. LabourList is blogging by committee and it doesn't work.

Devil's Kitchen and Old Holborn have multiple contributors. That is not the same as blogging by committee. The individual contributors don't discuss what they are going to write, they just put it on the blog. Other blog members can disagree, sometimes vociferously, but there is no editing of the original post by other blog members. You are reading the words of an individual. Just as when you get a group in a pub, one person puts forward a view and the rest argue about it.

Trying to converse on a place that's blogging by committee is like trying to argue against a council who are fining you for having an overfilled bin. You don't know who you're talking to, nobody takes responsibility for any statement and nobody ever needs to back down and admit they were wrong - even if it's patently obvious that their stance is ridiculous.

It's not a socialist thing. Other socialist parties seem to manage perfectly well. It's a Labour thing and it stems from a total inability to understand that people can do things themselves without the State telling them how, and without dipping in to the funding pot.

Therefore they discuss how much funding they need to employ a blogger or two, who's going to stump up the cash and who their target audience should be. None of those things apply to blogging. It's free. You write it and click 'send'. You don't even have to buy a stamp. So what if nobody reads it? All it cost you was a little time.

Blogs just float around in the ether. They are not to be found on newsagent's shelves. People find you when you comment on other blogs and they're interested enough to track back the link. If they're not interested, that's okay, it's all free. You cannot decide on a target audience. The whole world can find the blog if they want to.

As for 'local', well, why use the internet for that? You could just start up chats in the pub - except telling those locals that smoking, drinking and pies are all evil is going to mean a pretty short conversation.

Labour don't understand that the internet is not something they can control. They don't understand that it does not need a committee to run it. They cannot cope with the idea that an individual can do anything at all without State control.

And as long as they can't grasp that, they will lose.