Went into BBC Television Centre last night to record a review of 2005 with Neil McIntosh, Tim Worstall, Chris Vallance and Kevin Anderson. Managed to get a plug in for the Open Rights Group, and you can listen to the show online for the next week (til Mon 9 Jan; our bit starts around 26:50). I’ll try to get an MP3 again if I can.

It was slightly odd doing a review of the year because I couldn’t remember much of it. Talk about the recency effect - most of the year before December was a bit of a blur really. I spent ten minutes or so before the session began flipping through Tim’s book, 2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere, trying to swat up on what actually happened. As it turned out, I didn’t really need to worry and it was fun to try and make predictions (or, in my case, fervently held hopes) for 2006.

Still I made one point that I would like to think more about, and maybe get a bit more evidence for: ‘political blogging’ is usually seen as attempting to influence the electorate regarding voting when in fact, I think that activist blogging is a strand of political blogging that going to be more influential in the long run. If political blogs is talking about political issues, activist blogs are trying to get people to do something about those issues. Is that too fine a line to draw? Or are activist blogs really different to (and potentially more influential than) straight political blogs?