In a letter to the London Evening Standard of Tuesday August 9th, H MacLeod wrote the following, in connection with what I presume was a longer, paper version of this report:

Though I was encouraged by your report that there are 400,000 bloggers in the UK, I'm afraid that Britain still lags a long way behind France – which has the most online diarists per capita in Europe – particularly as far as leveraging a career from a blog is concerned (3 August).

Oh dear. Another of those Britain-lags-behind stories. France is outblogging us and we must all feel ashamed. So, the British government must help bloggers? A minister for blogging, perchance?

But no:

There may, however, be sound reasons for this.

In Britain, starting a business is relatively easy compared to starting a business in France, says Mr MacLeod:

… young French people, who live in a charming but utterly conservative, calcifying society, don't have many ways to express their ideas. Certainly starting a business is not one of them. A blog helps them bypass a culture absolutely saturated with bureaucrats.

So, the Anglo-French blog gap is a relative blessing for Britain rather than a curse. Britain, a land unsaturated with bureaucrats? Compared to France, it would seem, yes.

Under Mr MacLeod's name, the Evening Standard puts the address englishcut.com, which gets you to a blog which is all about the work and products of a bespoke Savile Row tailor, which, by the way, includes regular trips to other parts of the world, including to France. Presumably Mr MacLeod is connected in some way with this blog, although I can find no mention of him there.

So, in Britain you get your business going, and then, maybe, you blog about it. In France, you can't get your business going, so you blog instead. No wonder the blog gap is, for now, in France's favour, what with there being no business to distract them from their blogging.

There are surely other reasons for this gap, such as the fact that the French mainstream media are far more blandly unanimous than are the British media. So if could be that if France were to cut back on all its bureaucracy, it might not make much difference to that blog gap.

But it would still be worth doing for its own sake, and it is a pretty safe bet that a lot of those French bloggers are saying that too.

(Brian Micklethwait writes here).

Our blog of the week is The American Expatriate, run by Scott Callahan, a New Yorker now resident in the UK. He provides an antidote to some of the mindless anti-Americanism to which the more left-leaning parts of the British media seem prone. Look it up.

I was delighted to see that one of the best-attended sessions at the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting here in Miami was that on "New Media: The Power of the Blogs". Introduced by TechCentralStation editor Nick Shulz, the first speaker was Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine, which led the exposure of Dan Rather over the fake Bush service report. He surprised me by predicting that in just a few years, more people will be reading their newspapers online than on paper, but he's probably right.

And of course more information is getting to people through blogs and other media. What role remained for mainstream media (MSM) now, he asked?

His answer: probably they need to concentrate on what they are supposed to do - unbiased news - and let the bloggers get on with opinions. But Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies pointed out that in many parts of the world - Iraq and Lebanon, for instance - where it is hard for Western journos to penetrate, local bloggers can reflect reality with much more precision than the MSM, who can only work through official sources.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics observed that the rise of the blogosphere had produced a big loss of heft on the left. MSM articles are no longer taken at face value, so their left-wing bias (he was talking about the US media: in Britain we don't have any of that, of course) (ha ha) is less effective. And a cheering point for the right: the older generation may still be reading their news on paper, but it is younger folk who are online. In the war of ideas, in other words, the right has the winning troops, and they are fitter for the long fight.

A good friend of the Adam Smith Institute, Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, has set up a new blog. Compiled together with professors Nicolai Foss (economics) and Jesper Lau Hansen (law), political theorists Dr. Mikael Jalving and Mikael Bonde Nielsen, and a couple of his graduate students, the new collective free-market weblog, is called Punditokraterne (The Punditocrats).

The blog is dedicated to research, news and opinions about the free society and free markets. You may not understand the language, but it's good to know that not everying is entirely rotten in the state of Denmark...

Now that Tony Blair has announced the date of the general election, a new army of opinion formers is stepping out of the shadows: the bloggers...Blogs like Harry's Place, SamizData and the Adam Smith Institute have been steadily building audiences over the past couple of years, and there are signs of fresh activity in the run-up to the election.

So says Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper. Well, it's nice to be recognized. But the Herald still maintains the myth that blogging is somehow less important in Britain than the United States because "though not measured yet [the audience] is certain to be far lower than in the US."

Is that so? Well if they have not measured it, how do they know? I'm always staggered at the hits we get here, and the readership of blog-friends like SamizData are huge too.

And as the Herald says, folk like the BBC are rushing to set up blogs ahead of the May 5 election. They will make a cod's ear of it, of course, but their action shows they think blogging counts.

Moreover, the BBC and other media - not to mention the politicians – can be assured that if they promote or fall for some Rather-like scam in Britain, they will find out just how important British bogging really is - and will be shredded just as nicely, no doubt.

The ASI Blog has been shortlisted for the Guardian newspaper's political weblog awards. You know we're the best, so click over to their site and vote for us.

Our blog of the week goes to Guido Fawkes, a blog detailing "plots, rumours and conspiracies". Today they reveal Gordon Brown's budget plans in full:

Maybe I'm getting a bit unsound in my old age (er, mid-20s), but this week's Blog of the Week goes to The Guardian Newsblog. Here's its take on the anti-terror bill (which has now passed through Parliament after the government agreed to a "sunset clause in all but name"):

Watching the government's anti-terror bill bounce back and forth between the Commons and Lords, I can't help thinking that our representatives are thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Most Labour MPs don't particularly like voting for legislation to lock up refugees, asylum seekers and members of the Muslim community on the say-so of some spook or undercover policeman (as recent Commons rebellions show). Defending the supremacy of the elected chamber against aristocratic privilege, however, really floats their boat.

As Guardian Unlimited Politics diarist and Europe minister, Denis MacShane, points out in his latest dispatch from Westminster, Labour MPs are "united" as never before in their determination to see off the House of Lords. Sticking it to the toff is one of the things they went into politics to do.

Irreverent stuff. This blog is well worth a daily read.

Another milestone was passed yesterday in the long march of the bloggers. For the first time a weblog writer was admitted to a White House press briefing alongside the representatives of the mainstream media. Garrett Graff of FishbowlDC blogged from the Brady briefing room in the White House itself.

It took him a week of trying for a day pass, assisted by helpful members of the conventional pres corps. When he arrived, the guards were puzzled by his lack of press accreditation, but they let him in because his name was on the list. He reports that conditions in the briefing room “leave something to be desired.”

This is a recognition of the role of blogging as an addition and an alternative to the mainstream media, and an acknowledgement of the audience and influence it increasingly commands.

You have to subscribe to the pink paper to read Lucy Kellaway's article on corporate blogging, but in it she explains how CEOs have discovered the blogosphere as a communications tool, but almost invariably mess it up.

For instance, Randy Baseler, V-P of Boeing, produces blogs that read like corporate press releases, peppered with "groovy" words. Like "cool". The result, says Kellaway, is a case of Dad at the Disco.

Rich Marcello, Senior V-P of Hewlett Packard at least makes his blogs more personal. But raises lots of issues that people, frankly, don't care much about. And Richard Edelman, CE of the eponymous PR company, also tried to make his blog personal but just drones on and on about stuff.

Bob Lutz, V-C of General Motors, gets closest, says Kellaway, with stuff that is personal, committed, interesting - and evokes lots of comments pro and con. Which he then posts. That kind of blog is risky for a big corporation. But surely it's better than Dad at the Disco.

If you hang around computer geeks, you might have heard them rave about something called "RSS". What is this thing? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way of reading the articles on most blogs and good news websites in - theoretically - a more convenient way.

If you ever enjoy finding it a pain to load a blog only to find there isn't any new content, RSS may be for you. A plethora of programs are available that run on your computer and show you which of your favourite blogs have been updated and how many unread articles there are. One such program is Thunderbird which combines reading e-mail with reading blogs. Thunderbird is available on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The picture (top right) shows how it lists your e-mail mailboxes with your favourite blogs underneath. It tells you if there are unread blogs for you to read - so if the blog hasn't been updated, you don't waste time going and looking. You can click on a blog and it will give you a list of headlines, and selecting a headline gives you the article.

Websites offering an "RSS feed" normally say so with a button or words like "Syndicate this site". If you are using the Firefox web browser, a small orange icon will appear in the bottom right of the browser window.

From the print edition of The Times (London):

Adam Smith Institute Blog
www.adamsmith.org/blog

This think-tank's blog implies that state ownership is as evil as ritually sacrificing babies but it provides interesting and chucklesome views on public services. Cool pop culture are embraced, with one post on work-shy postmen headlined "The public sector loves Ferris Bueller". Geddit? Public sector works just adore those days off.

Our blog of the week goes to the Guardian newspaper. Their KickAAS blog (Kick All Agricultural Subsidies) has been running since the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun in 2003. Written by Victor Keegan, it's a voice of sanity.

Instead of subsidising farmers in poor countries like Afghanistan, Keegan says:

Wouldn’t it be simpler for the US, Japan and Europe to abolish their own subsidies (thereby returning money to taxpayers) rather than pricing Afghanistan's agriculture out of the market?

He's not a fan of Chriac's words about fighting poverty:

The President of France has started chiracing again. To chirac, according to KickAAS’s private dictionary, is to make high-sounding plans that have no chance of being carried out in order to distract from what is happening at home. President Chirac's latest pan-planetary initiative (are you listening Mr Bush?) is to tax all weapons sales and corporate profits to help the Third World.

There is a much easier way M Chirac because it's happening under your watch. Get rid of agriculture subsidies. That would save the West over $1 billion a DAY while giving poor countries a dramatic opportunity to develop crops like sugar and cotton that they can do efficiently but from which they are priced out of world markets at the moment because of immoral and uneconomic Western subsidies.

And on Africa he says:

The good news is that global poverty has been cut in half during the past 20 years (mainly because of fantastic progress in Asia). The bad news is that Africa has been passed by. The World Bank reckons that by 2015, half of the world's poorest people - those living on less than $1 a day - will live in Africa compared with 10% in the early 1980s.

What's the solution? The Bank says we need economic growth assisted by low trade barriers and aid. It reminds us that 70% of the poor in developing countries subsist on agriculture. In other words it is not really a case of the solution being economic growth "assisted by" low trade barriers. Abolition of agriculture subsidies would itself be a primary engine of growth for Africa. And it would not only cost rich countries nothing, they would gain substantially from not having to shell out $300bn a year bribing farmers to grow crops that can more profitably be grown elsewhere.

Liberty Cadre is the latest blog to emerge from the London political world, written by Andrew Dodge and friends. It does not hold its punches, mauling Identity Card advocates and anyone involved in NHS anti-smoking adverts... and high-tax politicians, too. Well worth a look.

Our blog of the week goes to Global Growth which is "a UK based non-governmental organisation (NGO) promoting free trade to raise living standards and reduce poverty worldwide. We focus on the advocacy of lasting solutions to the structural economic, political and cultural causes of poverty."

One of Global Growth's intellectual heroes is Richard Cobden, the 19th century classical liberal whose Anti-Corn Law League successfully defeated the immoral farming policies of the day. Today's Common Agricultural Policy - which kills 1 person every 13 seconds in developing countries - is one of Global Growth's main targets, and rightly so. This NGO is one to watch.

The blog of the week goes to Radley Balko's The Agitator. Outside cyberspace, Radley works as a Policy Analyst at Washington DC's Cato Institute.

On his blog, he regularly takes apart the arguments for the nanny state and paternalism. He recently published some G. K. Chesterton quotations which jumped out at me, including: "The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog." Such sentiments are a common theme on Radley's excellent blog. Do take a look.

Last night the ASI held a seminar on Democracy and the Blogosphere. The New Labour journalist and broadcaster Stephen Pollard pointed to the role of blogs in fact checking what journalists have written, potentially causing journalists to be more careful in what they write. Sandy Starr of Spiked was skeptical about whether blogs would have any influence in politics.

William Heath explained how he had been using a group blog, Ideal Government, to do an online brainstorm about how to improve government computing, which he had recently presented to the government's Chief Information Officer. However, he did say there was a danger that sometimes when governments get the answer they don't want they just ignore the feedback.

Perry de Havilland agreed with Pollard's view on fact checking, pointing out that bloggers had already managed to be the downfall of some major figures in the US. He said that blogs won't necessarily lead to the engagement with politics that some politicians think, instead questioning politics, rather than helping it.

I pointed out that the ASI Blog had enabled us to put up short pieces on the day of a news story, causing calls from journalists which might otherwise not have happened. There was much useful and vigourous discussion from the floor such as Jackie Danicki pointing out that it was not the format that matters but the content.

Highlights of the event are to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour on Sunday evening at 10:45pm.

If you would like to attend, please e-mail blogevent@adamsmith.org in order to get a place. We have limited space, so it's important to book. The event will be followed by a champagne reception. Click here for a map.

Here's the blurb...

Much hype surrounds the internet's self-publishing phenomenon known as blogging. Many claim that the blogosphere - the community of millions of blogs - is the key to reinvigorating the political process. Some believe that, using blogs, politicians will better serve their constituents, the disaffected will become involved in politics, and public confidence in the ability of government to solve society's problems will skyrocket.

There are also those who fiercely believe that, if only MPs would all start blogging, public debate would be dramatically revitalised. Is this wishful thinking in the age of spin doctors and party whips? Would more conversation with the public encourage our MPs to follow better policies, or lead to governance by opinion poll?

Does the blogosphere really strengthen the political progress, or is it more anti-Establishment than the Establishment would like to believe? Should the unprecedented ability of citizens to spread criticism of the state, its actions and its employees be cause for governmental alarm? Can our political process withstand such scrutiny? And is the blogosphere the big, equality-driving democracy so many claim that it is, or is it really a meritocracy, where the most interesting, compelling, and worthwhile ideas rise to the top?

A welcome addition to the blogosphere is the new Civitas Blog. Civitas, a London-based think tank, examines topics related to 'civil society' like crime and welfare. If its early posts are anything to go by - such as Prison is a bargain - it will no doubt prove challenging.

One-time ASI scholar Adam Thierer (pictured) is among the contributors of a new blog, cheekily called The Technology Liberation Front.

Issues being discussed include the role of the state in protecting music copyright, digital rights management, increasing broadband usage, free speech and censorship, and solving spam.

The blog's writers include several prominent commentators on technology issues, so it should prove to be a useful resource.

Here's a link to the opening, introductory post.

Our blog of the week goes to The Fly Bottle, written by PhD candidate Will Wilkinson. The blog has recently been enjoying a renaissance, with some very good posts. My favourite is this one on the delusions of happiness economics. A proponent of happiness economics says that rich people would be happier if they were taxed more. Quite rightly Will points out the problems with this argument. An interesting point Will makes is that there is a difference between having limited choices and having those choices stripped away from you. Reason's Julian Sanchez also attacks this view.

Our favourite blog this week is a newcomer called The Commons. Astute readers will have guessed that this is an environmental blog, named after the famous 1968 Garrett Hardin essay, The Tragedy of the Commons. The blog itself looks at how market mechanisms can solve environmental problems - solutions that are often ignored by environmental pressure groups, despite their effectiveness.

The Commons has a team of over 20 contributors who are noted experts on environmental policy. Go and take a look.

Our top blog spot this week goes to Hit and Run. It is published by Reason, the ultra-hip libertarian magazine edited by the excellent Nick Gillespie. The whole Reason team writes for Hit and Run, and - like the magazine - it takes conventional wisdom and stomps all over it.

Some of the team have personal blogs of note, too. Jesse Walker writes The Perpetual Three Dot Column; Julian "Leisure Suit Larry" Sanchez writes Notes from the Lounge; and Matt Welch writes over here.

Every summer a group of libertarian and conservative students descend on Washington DC to do paid internships at free-market organizations. They are part of the Koch Summer Fellow Program - a really worthwhile scheme for anyone considering a career in public policy. This year's bunch have created a blog. This is how they describe their site:

A group - roughly 5% anarcho-capitalist nutcase, 11% Randian, 10% embarrassing LP [US Libertarian Party] representative, 37% Republican apologist, 32% hippie-who-studied economics, 0% cold/amoral utilitarian, 0% evil commie (and 45% recount-demander) - comes together in the name of freedom.

The Social Affairs Unit has launched a blog - with the help of the team that set up ours.

It's early days, but already there are posts on subjects like why globalization reduces poverty and on how to sort out teacher training. One thing you can be sure of, this being the SAU's blog, is that it'll be challenging stuff.

Well worth dropping by.

The millions of blogs in existence form a decentralized information source, which interact spontaneously and freely without top-down instruction. Each individual blog is very much private property with an author, or team, who post material. If you want to make an impact on the 'blogosphere', you have to go away and set up your own blog. If it's good, others will link to it.

Conversely, wikis represent a form of voluntary collectism. Like blogs, they let information be published on the web very easily. But, unlike blogs, wikis normally let the general public update them without the need for a password or even peer review. It is easy for people, anonymously from an internet cafe, to maliciously delete articles, or publish inaccurate or offensive ones. Using a Wiki is like leaving your front door wide open. Like other collectivist experiments, they have problems.

Frank J.'s IMAO has long been one of my favourite blogs. Unlike many of the blogs highlighted on these pages in recent times, it is neither deep nor intellectual, just very funny - if, that is, you have the right sense of humour.

From the quirky observations of Bite-Sized Wisdom to the outrageous satire of In My World to the T-shirt friendly Know Thy Enemy, Frank's writing is often laugh-out-loud funny, although perhaps not to everyone's taste.

Politically, Frank is a Bush supporter - much more so than I am, I must add. It has always seemed slightly odd to me that he so often satirically portrays the Bush administration along the lines of the left-wingers' preconceived views: Bush as an over-aggressive idiot who is only a symbol for an administration which is really run by his advisers, Rumsfeld as a mad, bloodthirsty warmonger, and so on down the line. I certainly can't see the Republicans using IMAO as campaign material for the forthcoming election! Perhaps, though, this approach serves to highlight the ridiculous nature of the caricatures perpetuated by so many of Bush's detractors.

In all, while not always of direct interest to British readers, IMAO is usually good fun, and if your sense of humour matches Frank's, it can really brighten up your day.

Andrew Medworth is a student at the University of Cambridge.

The economics department at George Mason University one of the very best, so it should be of no surprise that we again single-out a blog from that source. Marginal Revolution is named after a very important development in economics, from the 1870s, which explained the relationship between a product and its value in the marketplace.

The blog recently discussed whether free trade means saying goodbye to the welfare state, and concluded no. There's also a piece on Australia television and whether national content should be protected from international content for cultural reasons.

As you may have noticed, our blog has become part of our main website. If you have us on your blogroll, or in your brower's bookmarks, you might want to update the link to www.adamsmith.org/blog

Inspired by an e-mail from Anthony Evans, we'd like to publicise UK free-market students who are blogging. Anthony was particularly interested finding blogs by UK economics PhD students - after his Liverpool undergraduate degree, he went to GMU in the States in order to do postgradute study in a free-market department.

If you are a student (undergradute and postgraduate) who blogs and have an interest in free-market economics, drop us a line in the comments and introduce your blog.

A welcome new addition to the blogosphere is Cafe Hayek, named after the Nobel Prizewinning economist F. A. Hayek.

Cafe Hayek is run by two lecturers from the Economics Department at George Mason University in Virginia: Prof. Russell Roberts and Prof. Don Boudreaux.

Their blog is topical, covering topics like how the market will correct overzealous offshoring, and why with trade policy why we should avoid Keynes's phrase: "In the long run, we're all dead."

A highly recommended blog.

White Rose is a civil liberties blog. It is heavily campaigning against the introduction of compulsory ID cards in Britain. The blog, which was started in May last year, successfully acts as a one-stop shop for information on 'big brother'. Highly recommended.

TransportBlog looks at transport policy from a free-market perspective, often putting forward radical solutions to the problems in the world's transport systems. It is edited by Patrick Crozier, Transport Spokesman of the Libertarian Alliance. Recent posts include the comparative safety of different types of transport, and an indication of how rail privatization has lead to rail companies focusing on the little details of making a journey more pleasant.

Our favourite blog this week is Marginal Revolution, written by the brilliant Tyler Cowen and others. Although American, it talks about British issues too. Of particular interest this week are blogules on how much of the organic food in Britain is genetically modified, and on how the British government intervenes to keep foreign paintings in the UK. Take a look.

In the beginning there were internet messageboards. The political left took to them like fish to water. The problem was that they were unmoderated, so they descended into places of general abuse. This suited the left because they were able to debate in the way they prefer: by shouting slogans. The occasional right-winger who tried to explain international trade would not have his ideas examined: he would just face personal insults.

But now internet messageboards are old-hat, and blogs are chic. Unlike messageboards, almost all of the major political blogs are right-wing. The left isn't happy. The New Statesman has called on the left to take part in the blogosphere to stop it being "dominated by the political right".

What the New Statesman missed is that the blogosphere leans to the right for a reason. Blogs offer a medium that is ideally suited to the right. They enable the more detailed explanations that right-wing ideas require.

To be successful in the blogosophere, you have to make reasonable arguments, and win over your readers. Left-wingers are very bad at explaining what they believe. They support fair trade coffee because it is fair. They want "people before profits", because it sounds good. They say "it's all about oil" because it is. They hate multinational companies, but don't understand economics. The more hip and trendy Third Way Left offers a much better tone, but they simply replace the slogans with meaningless jargon, which is just as bad.

Perhaps this lack of understanding is because relatively few on the left have converted to the left. Conversely, many on the right were brought up with left-leaning ideas, ingrained from their teachers and parents, and then during their teenage or university years worked out that they were wrong. An inherited view is just believed: a view you are won over to has to have an intellectual foundation.

One of the best UK blogs to be launched this year is The Daily Ablution, written by Scott Burgess. He's skeptical of what environmentalists preach, and rips to shreds some climate change graphs used by The Guardian (which would get a red line through them if you put them in a school maths exam).

Scott has also compiled a selection of quotes about environmentalists - by scientists and others who take a scientific approach to environmental issues. There's a great one by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who says: "The campaign of fear now being waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic."

We've been reviewing our blog, taking into account what our readers have been saying. We're going to have a greater variety of contributors, and more items. We are also rearranging where things are placed.

In line with sites like Andrew Sullivan, InstaPundit, Talking Points Memo, and many other of the top blogs, as of today the comments system has been removed. This is because only 1 in 1000 readers was using the system, and moderating comments was taking a lot of energy which we'd rather use to create new posts. But you can still communicate with us through the new "Feedback" option at the bottom of each item. And, indeed, we encourage you to use this feature to keep us on our toes.

Howard Dean's campaign blog - Dean's team says that Bush's tax cuts are "reckless and irresponsible". Since their effect has been to bring an 8.2% growth rate to the economy, the cuts seem quite sensible. That said, Dean's campaign have a point when they say that spending is out of control, but Democrats - Dean included - seem to want to spend even more.

Andrew Sullivan - "Toynbee is one of the most irritatingly self-righteous pontificators in Britain. She's wrong about the war. But every now and again, even she stumbles onto the truth."

Demos - although Tony Benn has given me the nickname "The Third Way Institute", Demos is rather more deserving of that moniker. On its blog, Demos is talking about "regulating self-regulation". Isn't that an oxymoron?

Harry's Place - a leading centre-left blogger pokes fun at George Galloway MP's new political party.