A recent Gallup poll showed that, in spite of Time magazine declaring 2004 the year of the blog, half of America’s supposedly wired population had never heard of blogging. On the other hand, most Americans couldn’t place America on a map of America, so what does that mean? Well, it means this: don’t assume your friends and family know what blogging is. This is important because, when you start, these are the only people who will read what you write. Whether they keep reading or not is up to you.

So begins a rivetting Sunday Times piece on How to blog. (It is far more entertaining than my How To Use an RSS Feed soon to appear in the Washington Post, if a little less helpful.) I suppose I shouldn’t have been offended. But however hard I tried, I just couldn’t help feeling a twinge of anger that UK newspapers were still treating the blogosphere in such a patronising way.

Hey ho. And thank god for Brit blogger Tom Coates, whose analysis of the Times piece is spot on:

I think the reason I find this whole article so amusing is because it’s the ultimate archetype of all news stories about weblogs. Its every word exposes the assumptions and prejudices of journalists and – I think more widely – the British. So you’ve got the censorious attitude to people expressing themselves in public (self-expression isn’t really proper), then you’ve got the whole amateur-versus-professional argument that neurotically restates only proper journalists are worth reading. These journalists, who – we are reminded by the rest of the article – really assume that (i) the only reason to write is to get famous, (ii) there’s no value in community or discussion or debate and (iii) normal people would sell their granny for dog meat to get famous. And to cap it all off, the examples that they use are all the ones that reveal the bankrupcy of the news media – that a culture of millions of webloggers can only really be understood by the tabloidish stories that make it across into the ‘proper’ media. The whole thing is gloriously cock-eyed.

And therefore wonderfully relevant. Because just when you think people are really starting to get it. Their minions go and balls it up!

“I thank you for insulting me.” Thus blogged former King Norodom Sihanouk to a critic of his support of gay marriage. He didn’t share any of the insulting e-mails with his readers, but noted: “My country, Cambodia, has chosen to be a liberal democracy since 1993. Every Cambodian … including the King has the right to express freely their view.”

(From Wired News: Royal Blogger Takes on the World.)

If the former King of Cambodia is blogging–how long before the future King Charles joins the fray? I can’t wait.

PS King Norodom’s website can be found here.