Remember all the agonising when Tim Dunlop shifted from The Road to Surfdom to Blogocracy under the Newscorp banner? And remember all the loud denouncin’ when Mark wrote *one blog post* for the Higher Education Supplement and some were quick to assume that this meant LP was about to be swallowed by the Murdoch beast? Well, they were assured at the time it wouldn’t mean that, but that didn’t stop all the conclusion jumpin’… As it turns out, I think there was an interesting issue of trust raised - and one that went precisely to some people’s false assumptions about what exactly is at stake when bloggers get co-opted. We’ve always argued here that one of the most important reasons for preserving an independent blogosphere is not just analysis and posting without fear or favour but also the distinctly different nature of the community and commenting it can foster - there’s no doubt at all in my mind that the News Ltd blogs, while they’ve been quite successful in occupying some of the space the independent blogosphere might have taken up (and might still take up - watch this space!), what they can’t do is replicate the latter. Aside from the fact that there’s probably little loyalty to most individual MSM bloggers and blogs per se (particularly where - as with most of the MSM columnists who “blog”, there’s zero interaction with the audience), the whole set up - seemingly arbitrary deletion or non-appearance of comments, strict barriers for defamation and other legal concerns, time lag between comments being posted and appearing - means that it’s very difficult to lift the threads beyond the bulletin board model and foster genuine interaction and community.

So I think - anyway - the real issue here is not any moderation of the bloggers’ own politics, but the literal difference in moderation on MSM blogs.

What’s interesting to me is that this evidently cuts both ways - left and right. Tim Blair has moved his blog over to the Daily Terror website. And his commenters are well aware of what the implications for them are. If you don’t want to read the whole thread, there’s a neat summary at The Blair/Bolt Watch Project.