Fisking Dolly

Bless, Derek Draper decided to reply to my post from yesterday and I thought his amusing rantings deserved a fisking. It is Sunday morning after all, so here goes.

Boy, the British blogosphere! What an introduction I have had. Never have I experienced such a self-important, self-regarding, self-obsessed group in my life.

Hang on a second, are you the same Derek Draper who told an undercover reporter that "there are 17 people who count. And to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century."?

No wonder the British Blogosphere is such a tiny, tiny, tiny ghetto. Don't any of you realise that I don't care what you think? Why would I? Why should I?

Who said the British blogosphere wasn't tiny? What's more, if you don't care Derek why are you wasting your Saturday evening writing 400 word rants on sites of such insignificance? Normal ordinary people go out on a Saturday night or just get rat arsed at home..... uh oh now there's a point..... you're weren't drunk typing were you Derek?

LabourList is designed (wait for it) for real people.

What, as opposed to holograms? Derek, "real people" don't give a flying fuck about politics. "Real people" have "real jobs" and "real lives" that involve getting up at 5am, cramming themselves on to a train, working all day, sometimes under the threat of redundancy.

You're about as real as an Action Man complete with little blue plastic pants, eagle eyes, and a cord that can be pulled from your neck so that you repeat the line over and over again. You're part of the political class who has total disdain for us proles unless we agree with you.

We are aiming at hundreds of thousands of Labour-minded people who want to partake of politics online, almost all of them for the first time.

Well that's lovely for you Derek, who suggested you weren't trying to do that then?

You all think I am trying to join your little band but I am not - who would want to? Why? You totally conflate the idea of being part of a sub group with using a particular medium, in a particular way, to leap over that group to the wider world.

Oh dear oh dear. Who ever said anything about thinking you wanted to join a little band Derek? No one is conflating anything, all that has happened is that you have been laughed and pointed at on a number of insignifcant websites which you don't care about so much that you just had to reply to them.

We have been going ONE week, our traffic far exceeds our expectations. We are only a beta site, our marketing, advertising and PR has barely rolled out, much of what we are doing - content, moderation etc. is experimental so that we have ironed out all sorts of issues before we launch on the 12th February to an entire country of potential readers.

Oh right, so your blocking the entire country of potential readers of your site until Februrary 12th? I didn't realise. That's awfully clever of you. Oh no wait, this is the Internet, you've already launched but, being all techie, you've slapped the word "beta" on because "hey that's what they like do in technology right?". Get a grip.

People who aren't "bloggers", don't know what "wordpress" is, do not know and will never, ever know who Tom [sic] Ireland or Dizzy or any of you are. I am aiming for the mass market where, to all intents and purposes you all don't exist.

Mummy, the nasty man said I don't exist! I think I'm going to cwy! Jesus wept, is this the same person who at the beginning of his petulent little rant accused the British blogosphere of being self-important? Derek you're living in a fantasy world if you think you're going to engage with anyone who isn't already engaged in some way with Labour politics.

And please, sweetie, don't fool yourself into thinking that there is a mass market of people as yet untapped out there in the "real world" that gives a toss about you, me or any of this web politics bollocks. Telling me that I don't exist is like preaching to the converted, the Internet and politics is a niche market not a mass market.

Some of us little self-important types have of course been lucky, some of us have written commentary for the national press, appeared on Sky or the BBC doing the same, but the truth is ordinary "real" people couldn't care less, they're more interested in Simon Cowell - and quite right too, he's honest after all.

While you are all poring over what I am doing because it is 100 times more interesting than any of your own ultra-minority antics, I will be building an online community of Labour-minded people - thousands of them.

Oh this is priceless. You make accusations of self-importance and then start tubthumping about how simply smashingly superduper and interesting your website is? Are you self-medicating on Valium or something?

Oh yes, and please stop throwing around figures like "thousands". They don't impress me, they don't make you big and special. No one is their traffic count. It's like the sad little online forum member who has the highest post count and thus thinks they are special because of it. It's largely meaningless.

Does the 25,000+ monthly readership of this site make me special? No. Do the 250,000+ absolute unique visitors in the last 12 months put me in an elevated position of authority? No. I'm just a bloke with a website that can happily walk along the street without being recognised because I'm still nobody. That's called being a "real" person Derek. It's great, you should try it some time.

When that has been achieved - and we have hit every stage and target we have set ourselves thus far - you are all going to look very silly. But no-one apart from us will ever know.

Well for a start Derek I didn't say you wouldn't achieve what you set out to do. However, this is essentially an IT Project and you are from the Labour Party, so let's not get carried away now. As David Miliband once told the BBC, you don't exactly have a "fame for competence with IT projects".

So, please, do keep blogging about me and Labourlist. The saddest, no, I mean, really, really sad thing is, - and this is the fundamental lesson I have learnt in these short seven days - you really seem to have got nothing better to do. I'm sorry guys, but its pathetic.

Yes Derek, I have so little better to do that, unlike you, I wasn't wetting my panties like a girl on a Saturday night and ranting on a site which I allegedly hold to have no significance, nor one that I cared about, or should care about in anyway.

Remind me again Derek, what's pathetic? The fact that I went out and spent the evening with 200+ real people at a party, or you, getting ever so upset and angry because someone pointed their finger at you and laughed.

For someone in politics you're not very thick skinned are you. Is that because your only experience has revolved around general aggression and getting your own way when you were officially spinning?

Now you'll have to excuse me, as a blogger I am clearly sitting at my computer with my underwear around my ankles and I must go and find some porn to watch, the pressure of all this is just getting too much for me and I need some sort of release.