Yesterday Iain Murray referred to Stephen Pollard as 'the British Instapundit' which struck me as a quite apt comparison. If there was a purely British version of the Blog Ecosystem or any of the other various blog charts, I'm pretty sure he'd come out on, or near to, the top. But, it got me thinking about whether there are any other parallels between British blogs and American ones.

Is British Spin the British Daily Kos, for instance? Junius the British Matthew Yglesias? There are interesting similarities in tone and subject matter between Au Currant and A Small Victory which makes them seem like trans-Atlantic versions of each other, and is Peter Cuthbertson the British version of Little Green Footballs?

However, while drawing these parallels is fun, thinking about it does show up the differences between British and American blogging that I (and many others) have commented on before. One thing that struck me when I re-arranged my blogroll a while ago, dividing up my British blogs into a specific politics category and a more general 'living in Britain' category was that the of the three British bloggers who've actually been elected to something (that I know of), two of them (Gert and Iain Coleman) are both firmly in the 'living' category, rather than 'politics'. Even our blogging MP, Tom Watson, doesn't stick to politics all the time - though I've not seen any mention of football by him since West Brom went down and Wolves went up. Can't think why...

And while the Pollard/Instapundit comparisons are generally valid, it's interesting that there don't seem to be any British blogs with the posting frequencies of Instapundit or Atrios (Beatnik Salad is the British Eschaton, by the way). That could just be an accident of circumstance, though - there aren't many people with both the time and the knowledge to post as often as Instapundit or Atrios and the ones who might do it in Britain could just not be attracted to the idea of blogging, or have even heard of it.

But, it does come to a rather British issue in that it can sometimes be seen as somewhat unseemly to be too dedicated to politics and not have that personal hinterland. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that a description of Gordon Brown as being 'obsessed with politics' was seen as an insult. It says something about our political culture when the idea of the second-most powerful politician in the country being obsessed with it is seen as being somehow wrong. However, we do seem to have a national desire to not take politics too seriously - the comment sections of British newspapers will run serious and humorous columns side by side and most of the broadsheet papers will run a (usually irreverent) Diary in the comment section as well. Among letters to the editor, you'll find what Private Eye calls 'Mike Giggler' emails among the serious discussion of the weighty issues of the previous day.

So, while I started this post by comparing British and American blogs, I'm not sure that it's the right comparison to be making. However, America is the 300-poung gorilla of the world of blogs and it tends to attract all the attention and comparisons. I'd reckon that Australia is probably a more apt comparison, in that I've not seen many purely political blogs from there (though if any of my Aussie readers want to correct me on that, go ahead) and those that do mention politics seem to do it in the same way as the majority of British ones do - as just one subject amongst many. It's odd, because Australian politics often seems a lot more interesting than most other countries. Whenever I read anything about it, I always get the feeling that the participants are just seconds away from deciding to settle it all with either a fight, a drinking contest or both.