The Nifty Fifty

If his first post is anything to go by, this Birmingham-based blog will be brilliant. I used to be a frequent traveller on what is generally regarded as the best bus service in Birmingham. I think killing the planet by global warming may well be more humane.

Hope this blog continues. Too many do not make it past the first year. What we need is a trust fund to help those blogs abandoned by their authors. Or a new reality TV series where someone like Tim Ireland or Iain Dale goes around rescuing abandoned blogs.

Update 16:05: Also linked to The Cowfield, Bob the Black Country Brummie and Methodist Preacher in the Greater Birmingham Blogs area. If you have/ know of a good West Midlands blog please e-mail me at the address on the right-hand bar. If you link to me and have not got a link back please also use this e-mail address to let me know. Please note that I am unlikely to link to blogs of an extremist nature.

The Best of Blogpower 2007

Blogpower is currently hosting the self chosen best posts of 2007. My submission was The Far-Right to Offend, an explanation to those particularly but not exclusively on the right-wing of the political spectrum, who often harp on about Islamofacism and the threat to our way of life exactly what freedom of speech is really supposed to protect. Not the politics of hatred but something far more important: our right to criticise the government without threat of persecution.

There are some good posts on this round-up so if you have some time get over there and have a look.

Dale's End

I seem to have been removed from Iain Dale's Blogroll. It happened sometime after I posted this article attacking his position on, of all things, freedom of speech.

There would be an irony if I was removed from the blogroll of someone who believes freedom of speech is the right to offend because, well, I offended them by pointing out (using freedom of speech) that they were wrong?

I really do not have time for right-wing hypocrites. Iain Dale follows Guido Fawkes in being dumped from the select few who make the national People's Republic blogroll.