In which I attempt to wrap up the whole debate with some responses to your comments.
Before I get into it, however, I strongly recommend this post by Stephen Downes about Community Blogging.
Stephen proposes a radically different way of how blogging could be a self-organising system. His detailed and insightful article takes a very critical look at the effects of the power spike law (why Instapundit or Scoble gets links from everyone’s blogroll) and why tagging is literally meaningless, and envisages an alternative structure for blogging in which communities of interest can emerge spontaneously from automatically-created metadata. (Whether this would be technically possible I leave others to judge.)
Some of this was in the back of my mind as I was clicking around the blogrolls, going in circles and feeling very frustrated at the structure I was encountering.
And so on to your comments.
What did I mean by "missing"?
My starting point was that I wanted to find “more British blogs about new media.” This was simple curiosity - I had a vague notion of discovering some bloggers who might be writing high-level overview material that would be an alternative to:
1) The day-to-day coverage you tend get from Netimperative and New Media Age (“Company X chooses Web design company Z for its new site”) and
2) An American vision of things, in which there tends to be a discourse of the USA always taking the lead and inviting others to follow. (NB I mean this without prejudice, having an MA in American Studies from a US university.)
I discovered that that blogrolls clustered and that major new media agencies were not blogging.
Martin Wisse and Phil Edwards both picked me up on the naturalness of blogs clustering. In response, I’d say that what surprised me was that the blogrolls didn’t just cluster, they seemed hermetically sealed.
Mark Thristan: “The new media community is more disparate in the UK. I'm based in Glasgow, and have never managed to get an IA/UX meetup sorted out. If you're outside of London, it strikes me that no-one knows you exist.”
I’m not criticising the individuals or groups I looked at, but it did make me question the nature and value of blogrolls. It may be “natural” to link to friends, colleagues, and well-respected/expert bloggers, but it’s the “weak links” between strongly-linked groups that are crucial for information flow and finding new people, ideas and views. (See Mark Buchanan’s book Small World.) And these were conspicuously missing - hence my Adopt A Blogger proposal to encourage everyone to look for someone new and outside their existing network.
Why does it matter for business?
David Cantrell: “So let me get this straight. Because we're less into obnoxious self-promotion and dull corporate wank we're "behind"?”
Martin Wisse: “Be glad there are less corporate whores and media wankers doing the blogging thing in the UK than in the US…”
OK, but it struck me as disappointing that 15 out of 15 major web design agencies didn’t seem to feel the need to have blogs that might address, say, Web standards, usability, accessibility or new developments on the net (eg why social bookmarking is important). If they can’t be bothered to set an example, why should anyone else in any business bother?
Hana Loftus: “I think with time the UK will develop a perhaps more interesting online life than the US, but it does need to start perhaps more in the professional sphere than the personal.”
However…
Geoff Jones: “Here in Cambridge UK, so called hi-tech centre of the UK. I am amazed at the talks I go to that 99% of people are clueless about blogs.”
Not very encouraging. This does have real economic consequences. If British companies are less visible globally than others, then they’re less competitive. (I used to be a business journalist, so I notice these things.)
I’m not proposing that every company should rush out and launch some ill-considered “marketing blog”. They could, however, look at encouraging staff to blog about areas in which they’re experts and by sharing real knowledge (not “dull corporate wank”), then also do themselves some good, too.
Why does it matter outside business?
Imran Ali: “But why would blogging 'not spreading to the rest of the British population' concern? Should we expect it to?”
Outside the business realm, I think it does matter. If thousands of people are blogging about their experiences and expectations of, say, the NHS or public transport, that seems to me to be healthy for democracy.
In her own blog, Hana Loftus pulled up some stats about the blog gap between the USA and the UK and pointed out the benefits of blogging for everyone.
Adopt A Blogger
Drew McLellan: “There's a reasonable list of UK new media blogs here”
Phil Edwards: “I wrote: "if you're really bothered about the health of the British blogosphere, I can give you 50-odd URLs to get you started". ” (See also the comments for more about the USA vs the UK blogging scene.)
Robin Grant: “If you want 'new media' type blogs, here are a few”
Imran Ali: The UK's largest ISP and Europe's 2nd largest telco are blogging
Russell Buckley: I write pretty regularly about new media from a mobile perspective in Mobile Weblog
Rey: I'm a British weblogger :)
James Cherkoff: My blog is called Modern Marketing and is about the ways in which marketing is changing as a result of a user-friendly web
Ryan Morrison: “I tend to link to other bloggers I read or like the writing style of, when I post something I look on Technorati for other bloggers talking about the same or a similar thing, if I like their writing style I will link to them - simple really!”
Which seems like a pretty good way of finding new bloggers outside your own usual circle!
Many thanks to all of you who took the time and trouble to comment and post at length to the Missing Bloggers series. It’s been a great exchange!
And finally, if you want to comment of any of this you’re welcome - and I’ll aim to respond in the comments, too. Otherwise, normal service is being resumed on Broadband Stars and it’s back to blogging about the social uses of media.
And the next issue of Live Net Music!
Cheers,
Colin
Doug Richard of Dragons' Den fame is hosting his 
