Barone Balance. Michael Barone analyses blogs (via Instapundit) and their political effects. He makes a lot of spot-on points, and struck the biggest chord for me when he said 'the right blogosphere was different from the left. There was no one dominant website and no one orthodoxy'

It's very much my impression that Kos is the darling of the US Left. In the UK the situation is different, but in the States it seems like being part of an overwhelming movement, submerged in a mindset and worldview of moral indignation, is the only way to be for the Left- hence Kos's success, which has coincided with the Left's failure. This authoritarian tendancy is the natural consequence of the ideological fixity which is inseparable ultimately from socialism.

Here in the UK the blogosphere is less developed, and really the most recurrent thought I have is that with Blair we're going through what I feel to be our 'Clinton years'. With the rest of Europe so weak economically, and no stained dresses on Mr Blair's conscience, and no 9/11 wake up call conceivable for so many reasons (and let's hope we never have to deal with such an event), perhaps we'll never realise- but I am sure we'll see the Blair years as a time of political lethargy, waste and missed opportunities.

I'd say the blogosphere in the UK actually leans leftwards, in a lukewarm sort of way, and that, even absenting a Conservative Kos, the Conservative perspective is held more emotionally than rationally. It's at the point when hard-headed Conservatism makes a return that we might see the kind of reversal that would synchronise us with the US blogosphere.

I think that will happen over the next ten years- too long but worth waiting for.