Excellent post. I've been sort of avoiding the comment section over at the Shotgun so I was confused as to why you posted Blogging 101. Now I get it...

Besides, your blog is great fun to read and after all that is all that matters.

Greg

What is a Norm Spector, and are replacement parts available on Ebay?

"I might have offered that a blog with categories devoted to "roadkill" and "penis news", that blows up Toronto Star columists in animated gifs, isn't in the business of breaking open hard news angles - and saved him the flight of fanciful arrogance..."

So what? The National Post has Sheila Copps. You could have a category called "grown men shoving duct-taped small rodents up their arses so they can dance better" and you still wouldn't suffer from the credibility problems that the Post has wrought upon themselves by bringing Tequila Sheila on board.

I can't help noticing the similarity between Spector's comments, and Warren Kinsella's from October of last year:

"I don't give a rat's ass about obtaining, and keeping, a charter membership in the "blogging community." That's why I don't do things that all of these bloggy folks do - "permalinks," "RSS feeds," archiving what I write for more than a year, blah blah blah. What I write is aimed at the outside world, not the blogcult.
...
When I gave that speech at Trent last week about blogging and politics, I was asked by a couple students if I thought blogging was a fad, or whether it would last. My suspicion, increasingly, is that it will eventually fade away, bogged down - blogged down, you might say - by solipsism and incoherence."

Birds of a feather think togther, I guess.

Here's my question, though: if the Canadian blogosphere is such a small and insignificant pond, why are these two self-styled big fishes half-heartedly splashing around in it?

Or to follow your analogy, why are people who think of themselves as apex-predators hanging out with a bunch of nibbling ducks?

Yeah Damian, that crossed my mind more than once, too.

They do protest too much.

I've been trying to avoid turning the Shotgun into a flamewar site, but this is one pompous ass that has a serious need for an ego deflation and he's really starting to annoy me. It might be time for righteous fisking.

Jaeger, I'm not sure what you have in mind, but I can't imagine how one would improve on Kate's piece here.

"Mystery solved" hits it exactly - I am frequently confused by Spector's tone and/or arguments, and now I know why. No argument will work, because it's a different mentality. If you see yourself as a professional home builder, you resent being criticized by someone who re-tiled their bathroom once.

I second Kate's closing thoughts.

And you were going to send me into that den of vipers, Kate.

For shame :)

Well said, Kate. The mainstream media is finally realizing that there are others who can write and that no one is forced to read their trash.

"When you're in a position to bring down a Canadian Dan Rather, or to break open the Canadian angle on oil for food,let me know"

Well I guess the Canadian MSM hasn't made it either, because to the best of my knowledge none of them have accepted/fabricated pathetically phoney documents and then co-ordinated a smear campaign with the DNC.

Although you never can be quite sure about the CBC or The Star... (just kidding you lawyers!)

Ah, the journalistic integrity of the old media.

John Roberts, aka J.D. Roberts, of old CITY-TV fame and the New Music/Much Music circa 1979,could be the next CBS bingo caller.J.D. was spunky and quick witted, when doing verbal jousts with a very young Sting, in the grotty basement of Larry's Hideaway in Toronto, but still can't bat his weight when he reads the CBS cue cards.Oh, he's a serious person, and he oozes gravitas.

See, there is a Canuck angle to all this.

I don't go to the Shotgun anymore. I can't stand scrolling through the massive bloat that Norm drops in. I sure hope the Western Standard isn't wasting any of my subscription fees paying this liberal joker to pollute their website.

What an arrogant elitist. I was recently linked to by Michelle Malkin. If Michelle feels that my blog is of value that means FAR more to me than ANY endorsement Norm could bestow.

What a pompous punk. Urg, you got my blood pressure up :)

While there's nothing I'd like better than to read Kevin or Kate fisking Norm, I'm afraid the job's already taken. Norm is fully self-fisking.

A sample Norm discussion on The Shotgun (paraphrased for clarity):

Norm: Nothing worthwhile can come from the blogosphere. Look, the Washington Post writes about an exit poll study!

Kate: Here's a link to a poll expert's blog, in which he shows that the study's results don't justify its conclusions.

Norm: But ... but I read an article in the Washington Post! Written by a journalist! Besides, Kate is a poopyhead meanie!

Norm Spector. Former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney. Former Ambassador to Israel. Globe and Mail bloviator. Clueless senior citizen.

It's amazing that someone with such a thin skin once held an ambassadorship to Israel. The only conclusion one can draw is that our civil service is anything but a meritocracy.

mgl - After seeing that latest exchange I agree, Kate has done a magnificent smackdown.

I still can't believe Ezra allows him to dis all those actual and potential subscribers ad nauseum. Norm may have a point that the more strident social conservatives, libertarians, alienated westerners and American-oriented bloggers aren't a net benefit to getting the Conservative party elected. But they certainly are part of the target readership for the magazine.

Having a former Ottawa bureaucrat and Globe columnist slagging them all 24 hours a day as intellectual masturbators, playing with themselves, living in a fantasyland and all the other insults in the most sneering, condescending tone imaginable is a rather bizarre marketing strategy for a Western magazine. It has a certain morbid fascination to it, but it's certainly not the image I'd be trying to project for either the magazine or the blog.

Lets jump right in and start with the Power Corp, Maurice Strong, Jean Chretian, Paul Martin, TotalElf connection. There is I'm sure a lot more to this than just cocktail circuit gossip! Canada's position on the US/Iraq situation is very interesting when considered ion light of the agreements signed between Saadam and TotalElf for the developement of the northern oilfield in Iraq. This agreement was entered into at about the same time as Chirac was enjoying a summer holiday in Quebec!
PS Canadians footed the security bill for that to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.

Spector has readers? I gave up on him a long while back, and have also stopped reading the Shotgun. It's just tiresome.

I can't figure out what Norman is up to. As a non-Canadian I am, of course, out of the loop. However, I've got to say, to me he seems like a pretty toxic guy.

1) It appears to me that Norman intentionally went after Kathy Shaidle with the desire of driving her and a socially conservative opinion off the Shotgun. (Social issues often get voters moving when nothing else will.)

2) He seems to have intentionally gone after Kevin Jaeger for no discernible reason. Unless he also had a hidden agenda of driving Kevin from the Shotgun.

3) He appears to be going after Kate and doing everything in his power to discredit her for obscure reasons.

4) I think he could be wrong about Fox. I think it could wind up converting many people to conservative opinion even if he is correct that it would also give liberals a target.

5) I suspect conservative Canadian bloggers have a more influential effect on public opinion than Norm wishes to concede.

6) I find Norman's insistence that conservative Canadian bloggers reject the US as a consideration as suspicious and, frankly, insidious. I mean, isn't it reasonable to wonder if Canada were physically next to Germany or France, would its insurgent conservative movement be as viable? Why would someone who claims to be a conservative like Norm be so insistent that Canadian bloggers reject the strides of the conservative moverment in the US? Is it just me, or does anyone find this to be a little sinister?

Norm said something a day or so ago, about how he suspected bloggers were secretly hoping someone would grab them up to write for a steady paycheck.

I think the opposite is true. I think that the real thing that worries professional journalism is that bloggers do it for free - and make it look easy.

Kate, have you been following the SCO/IBM lawsuit? I think we're going to see a bunch of the same tactics used by SCO also used by the MSM against bloggers. They'll lose, of course, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Norm's rigid, limited view of Canadian conservatism indicates to me a continued adherence to the sort of top-down, elitist leadership that gaves us the Meech Lake and Charlatan Accords, not to mention Charterolatry[TM] and the gay marriage diktat from the courts. The accords were rejected; the PC Party was virtually annihilated. Once again Canadians are showing limited patience with being dictated to by arrogant politicians and unelected apparatchiks. Some people learn from past mistakes; others want to repeat them.

Norm recently commented on The Shotgun that the people are never wrong but need to be "educated". That's the same arrogant disdain for Canadians that so characterised Trudeau and Mulroney and remains the metier of the CBC, Globe and Mail and obsolete media. It's completely inconsistent with the bottom-up blog model, which assumes that bloggers and their readers actually have stores of knowledge and experience and can share them in a rapid, responsive way.

I remarked to my father the other day, when he was here visiting - that it seemed to me that the Conservative party had been down this "we must disassociate from socially conservative western rednecks" before - it ended up with Reform winning 52 seats in parliament.

Greg, I couldn't agree more about U.S. considerations on Canadian blogs. It's just another attempt to control the agenda by limiting the sources of information we're allowed to ponder. A mandarin who wants to preclude any meaningful debate and dictate a particular policy outcome -- Conservatives MUST do/say "A" -- doesn't want to hear that "D" works well on the U.S. federal level, Texas likes "B", North Carolina is considering "E" and "C" was a disaster in Oregon.

Where would we be if people were presented with meaningful choices and given the ability to decide for themselves? There's a word (or three) for a system like that.

The thing I don't understand is why Mr. Spector posts - and why Mr. Levant allows it - what appears to be an exact copy of the stuff that's at his own website.

Shouldn't he just post a short link that says "If you like what I think is worth reading, and/or you're too lazy to use Google News (http://news.google.ca), click on this link?"

As I speculated in a later exchange, Norm may be on medication. It's the only logical explanation for his behavior, on the face of things.

Ther'es a different "face of things" to consider. He may be out to sabotage the blog and undermine the traffic levels. I doubt many people continue coming to the Shotgun in the morning when all they see is an endless page of meaningless, linkless junk.

http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2005/01/blogging_101_ka.html#c3569676

This comment and the preceding one suggest Mr. Spector is some species of troll, deliberately being an ass to provoke reaction. Presumably he derives some twisted gratification from its "educational" aspects.

It was amusing when he commented that "anybody" can write a blog - when his own inability to understand the basics of blogging (or even that he maintains a plain vanilla website, not a blog) demonstrates exactly the opposite.

Kate, your idea that he may be on medication could have merit.

He seems to come unglued and to argue too illogically for a man of his age who has worked at high government levels and has been an ambassador. I would have expected a more measured, diplomatic, consensus-building sort of rhetoric from him.

Charles, I like your idea in respect to measuring choices presented by the different experiments in democracy of our states, and how it might relate to you.

I also find myself wondering if Norm is a little afraid of Canadians who really acquired a taste for American-style democracy.

Incidentally, I still favor statehood for Alberta.