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I think its a great credit to this site and the Missing Like team that Kieran names this site as the site with the most reasoned discussion, and that its put smack in the middle of the political spectrum (slightly to the left in Crikey and slightly to the right at Kieran’s).

Club Troppo appears to have a higher proportion of well though out, original and informative posts.

Tim Blair offers little other than a comment designed to start a (rather predictable) “discussion” and Andrew Landeryou is more flashing images than substance. This is only in my oh so subjective opinion.

Sear and Leftwrites are of course both on the left, but Sear is a lot more tongue in cheek/sarcastic. I think the Crikey scale confused this with strength of conviction, equating the tone of the posts about left issues on Leftwrites with centrism.

I feel Troppo has marginally less fluff than John Q (with the never ending open discussion threads) and LP. Catallaxy is usually very reasoned and informative about their topic of choice, but occasionally there is a post which I get the feeling is designed to do little more than start a new pointless stoush.

In my own blog I use the word “I” a lot, and I feel that the broader world relevance of a post has an inverse correlation with the use of the word “I”.

None of this in any way entails a judgement about the value of various blogging endeavours.

Maybe someone is interested, but I’m sure they can find their way to the blogs concerned.

May I suggest you pop over and debate this at Catallaxy (where SL is one of the principals). I felt you had a fair point in the first place, which is why I linked your response in the main ML text. But to be blunt, I don’t think this sort of interpersonal squabble is even remotely interesting for most readers. The idea of Missing Link is to publicise interesting posts from all around the blogosphere, so that readers can then trot off to blogs that interest them and join in the discussion there. The object certainly isn’t to attract spillover Catallaxy squabbles to be continued here.

As should be reasonably obvious from Catallaxy’s spot on both Crikey’s and Kieran’s graphics, I’m likely to disagree with you on that. I don’t think excessive state regulation works very well, either with regard to civil liberties or the environment.

Now I haven’t followed this particular stoush as closely as I might (it’s called a dayjob), and - unlike Ken - I don’t like the way you made the piece over at your place all about you, rather than about the issue (which was, ahem, the War on Terror). Obviously - as Ken’s comment shows - there’s room for disagreement on that point, and that’s fine.

If it’s not too much trouble, do you think you could answer my question?

WRT to polite discussion - and just to show we Missing Linkers aren’t some sort of hivemind - I’ll point out that I respectfully disagree with Ken on the whole Tim/Jason thing. That said, I should have linked Tim’s piece in the main body of Missing Link and let the two stoushes/stoushees speak for themselves.

Also, I don’t mind if people ‘linkwhore’ in Missing Link threads, or pop links worthy of interest in the Catallaxy open thread. Legal Eagle has already invited people to do likewise over at her place. Yes, the ML team reviews lots of blogs, but that’s no substitute for the eagle eyes of Australian blogland generally. If you see something good, do tell us about it. We may never know otherwise.

And yes, Legal Eagle is a treasure. I’m very glad she’s on the team.

The term ‘LamBird’ and the concept behind it wasn’t coined by me but by Humphreys. Why is Lambert only making a big issue of it now just because I decided to apply it to anti-terrorism laws?

There was no ‘abuse’ of Tim in my original post - the only thing I directly attributed to his person was ‘two well known Ozblogistan commentators and advocates of big government’ - this is the only thing that I implied Lambert had in common with Bird, contrary to Ken’s dishonest implication that I was saying they were akin in all other respects. The rest of the mention of Lambert is merely my reproducing bits of John Humphrey’s original blogpost to set the background for the idea.

It was never intended to be an inter-blog war post as Lambert keeps insisting.

I didn’t get annoyed until he started showing up and making an issue out of it and detailing the thread and what he calls ‘abuse’ was in the comments in response to his constant spamming.

But if this is the only way the little pope can get his pathetic 15 mins of fame, so be it.

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I’d be surprised.

Now here’s someone who really needs to lighten up. I took the mickey out of Blair something like a couple of years ago and he’s still carrying on about it. Let go, Tim B. All that anger can’t be good for you.