Ryan MacMillan

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum. I, however, merely abhor top lists of the top anythings of anything …ever! The sort of wretched space-filling drivel which populates E4’s weekend schedules. You know, unmitigated dross like The 100 Best Childrens TV Shows… Ever! Or The 100 Funniest Sitcom Moments… Ever! (which latter show is a sort of spiralling death drive towards Delboy falling through the bar) Whether it is the spuriousness of the compilation’s rationale and epistemology (which tend towards what we might charitably call wildly subjective) or the dread inevitability with which Fearne Cotton crops up to describe something as ‘like, totally random’, they can but drive me to utter distraction.

Anyway, as though just to spite me, The Observer has just released its own list of the 50 Most Powerful Blogs in the World (it helps, I find, to say it in the voice He-Man used to announce the Masters of the Universe, n0.7 best cartoon ever) . Here’s their top 10:

1. Huffington Post

2. Boing Boing

3. Techcrunch

4. Kottke

5. Dooce

6. Perez Hilton

7. Talking Points Memo

8. Icanhascheezeburger?

9. Beppe Grillo

10. Gawker

Now, you’ll see my problem immediately: powerful? The list goes on to include such noted blogging potentates as ‘Students for a Free Tibet’ (free from what, I always wonder; literacy? a non-theocratic system of government which isn’t ruled over by a reincarnation?) ‘Waiter Rants’ and ‘Angry Black Bitch’ - all of which may indeed by jolly good blogs, but they are not by any stretch of the imagination powerful. They have no influence. They have no real way of affecting their immediate environment, let alone the wider world. The list includes one of my very favourite blogs; ‘Go Fug Yourself’. GFY is a daily source of hilarious amusement to me, but I think its authors would agree that to put it on the same list as the Drudge Report (no.11) or Crooks and Liars (no.37) or even, though Satan herself she may be, Michelle Malkin (no.28) in terms of ‘power’ is errant nonsense.

So I can see the HuffPo at no.1, but putting Nick Denton’s Gawker one spot ahead of Drudge is idiotic - and, I’m sure, nothing to do with the exclusive interview with Denton featured in, yes, The Observer. Ditto for Beppe Grillo and the godlike Icanhascheezeburger: they’ll make you laugh your ass off, but they have no real power. Neither do blogs-that-turned-into books like Petite Anglaise (no.36) and Girl with a One-Track Mind (no.24). Sure they’ve got good writing, interesting stories to tell, but that’s not power. HuffPo and Drudge break stories, break careers; they put people in power and put issues on the political agenda: that’s power.

All of which begs me to wonder, why couldn’t The Observer just call it ‘50 Blogs We Like’? It wouldn’t be because they were trying deperately to add a scientistic air of quantitative legitmacy to what is basically just a mashup of the Features Desk’s bookmarks, would it?

UPDATE: The Daily Kos is calling it ‘a staggeringly silly list’. In unrelated news, the Daily Kos is not on the list.