Just taking a moment to welcome the Observer Blog to the world. Like the precocious kid sister that you know is going to outperform you,
Cynics have already got in with a few punches: "this is not a genuine blog", and "this is mainstream media pretending to blog" etc.
I find this funny for a couple of reasons.
Firstly because very few people have complained to me about Onlineblog being an extension of big media. And that's been around for much longer than the Observer (indeed, there are those who seem to think that OB is the first blog within the Guardian Media Group... I'd beg to differ).
The second reason is that bloggers - at least the ones who like to ride that big old nag called the high horse - spend a lot of their time deriding big media for "not getting it", for toeing the party line, for. And then when someone breaks out of the fold, they say "that's just corporate guff". You just can't do the right thing sometimes.
The third reason is that I've not got the same view of blogs that many journalists hold. I've actually been writing my personal weblog for longer than I've been a professional hack. I'm still not very good at it, but I don't see this huge divergence between forms that angry partisan writers on both sides of the divide seem to envisage. I see online publishers, I see bloggers, I see all the shades in between.
Anyway, I digress. What I really meant to say was: welcome to the world, junior.
