The Smelly Sockpuppets of Môn

I have been following the Welsh Blogosphere from its earliest days; one of the paucities of the Welsh blogosphere as a coherent entity is the lack of comments on most posts. The typical number of comments on posts which I have published in the last 12 months is 3-6, one in 10 of my posts have had no comments at all. A quick flick through the Total Politics Top Ten suggests that my comment rate is typical of the others.

There are exceptions. Wales Home often has posts which receive more than 50 comments, Blamerbell use to attract a huge number of commentators on some posts, but even they have had no comments on some posts.

The exception to the exception is the Druid of Anglesey – The Druid's weakest posts in the last 28 days have had 7, 9 and 18 comments, the typical number of comments is 30-60, it's not unusual for his posts to get well over 100 comments – Wow!

I recently posted about my disappointment at finding out that, despite his protestations of being above party politics, the Druid has declared himself to be a Tory hopeful in the next Assembly Elections. I have had an above average response to that post.

But there was something odd about the number of responses.

In response to every other post that I have made in the last 4 years that has been controversial enough to get more than 15 comments, about half the comments have come from signed commentators; the signed response to my post about The Druid was 2 out of 21!

Wales Home and Blamerbell also seemed to have had 40-60% signed comments on their most popular posts. But the Druid has an incredible and untypical number of unsigned posts, in comparison to most other blog sites, fewer than 10% signed on his last ten entries. Those that are signed are mainly from the just 7 individuals.

Something doesn't seem open and transparent. Something smells a bit corrupt! Could it be a dirty sock, over used as a puppet?