MARGARET LIKES MARK

According to Margaret Simons, Mark Bahnisch is more than your typical blogger:

The blogosphere in Australia has yet to gain the political clout of the best US sites, for reasons that have been discussed by leading blogger Mark Bahnisch in On Line Opinion.

Maybe Simons is still relying on Bahnisch's swollen-headed view of his own prominence:

And today the left-leaning Larvatus Prodeo, which claims to be the country’s best read political blog, has released statistics which suggest that might be true. LP claims to have had 31,612 unique visitors in October – showing steady growth from January, when it was just 17,148.

Lavatory Rodeo's incestuous cross-promotional collaboration with Crikey appears to be paying off, with its count now up to 3,021 visits a day. That averages out to 188 visits a day for each of Rodeo's 16 bloggers. Now whereas visit count isn't everything, lone blogger Tim Blair is drawing 9,458 visits a day. Just saying...

Simons is also delusional about the prominence of New Limited's token lefty, Tim Dunlop:

Dunlop told me the week after his post was pulled that he was having “talks” with management about editorial independence and expected to be able to blog on the result of his talks soon. He still hasn’t done so, but is continuing to blog feistily on other matters. My understanding is that Dunlop has, after much soul-searching, decided to give News Limited one more chance.

But Fairfax's axing of a blogger who can actually write doesn't get a mention. Go figure.