I was planning to write a post taking issue with my friend Oliver Kamm's piece in yesterday's Guardian, which he concluded thus:

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

I disagree with Oliver's view of blogs. In my view, blogging is not in itself a good or a bad thing, just as TV news is not a good or a bad thing in itself. TV news can educate and it can mislead (the same holds, of course, for newspapers and other media). What matters is the quality of a blog (which has nothing to do with its political standpoint), just as what matters with broadcast news is the quality of the output.

To contradict myself, I do think the fact that without blogging we would not have beeen able to access the opinions of writers from Oliver himself through to the writers on Harry's Place, Tim Worstall and Scott Burgess (my favourite non-professional writers' sites) is a strong positive in favour of the medium itself.

But when I read the stupid, abusive and illogical comments which dominate the responses to Oliver's piece on the Guardian site, I have to wonder if perhaps Oliver has a point, albeit a misdirected one. Until I made commenters register on my site I spent a ridiculous amount of time having to delete abusive, libellous and bigoted comments. Although the sheer number of such comments is now reduced, I am still shocked at the level of personal abuse which some commenters think appropriate in response to a post with which they happen to disagree. Perhaps it is not bloggers who are, as Oliver puts it, responsible for the poisoning of debate. Is it not (some) commenters?