This morning I woke up with a start and immediately reached for the Blackberry on my bedside table. This is an incredibly bad habit, which I must rid myself of. Among the messages that had come in overnight was this comment posted on the blog by WCM, who makes "no apologies" for his rudeness. He suggests that I am not doing my job properly because I am writing about trivia and neglecting important issues like developments on the Turkish-Kurdish border, developments in Pakistan, the world of private equity etc…

WCM is not alone in his concerns. When I mentioned to my colleague Lucy Kellaway that I was planning to write about celebrities this week, she looked slightly concerned and said - "Isn’t that a bit moronic?" However, since her previous column had been devoted to seeing how many swear-words she could get into the FT in one go, I did not feel Lucy was in a position to preach. (I recommend the podcast incidentally).

However, the issue raised by WCM and LK is a valid one. My answer is that the question I ask when choosing a topic for my column (or indeed for the blog) is not - what is the most important thing going on in the world? It is - do I have anything original to say about this?

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I have a guilty confession to make. I love Wikipedia. I had not realised this was a particular source of shame until I went to a recent conference on the new media. Speaker after speaker said that, of course, no responsible journalist would take facts off Wikipedia, which is notoriously full of errors. I said nothing. I’m sure I’ve done this lots of times - usually uncontroversial little, fact-checky things. But data all the same.

In fact, I was at it again this afternoon - as I was researching my newspaper column for next week (small trailer) on sex scandals (out on Tuesday!!!!). Put in almost any name into Google - Bill Clinton, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Blair - and it is likely that the Wikipedia entry will be the thing that comes up first. It’s really useful.

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Tony Blair is working right up to the last minute. Some FT colleagues and I went to see him earlier this week, for top-secret discussions about the future of Europe. But just as interesting as the off-the-record stuff (I thought), was what Blair had to say about the Oscar-winning film, “The Queen” – which portrays Blair and the Queen, dealing with the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana.

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Are bloggers capable of coherent thought? Or does the pressure to keep gabbing work against sustaining a complex argument? For obvious reasons, this is a question that interests me quite a lot. And I must say that reading Andrew Sullivan’s newly-published "The Conservative Soul" (HarperCollins) is mildly encouraging.
Sullivan is one of America’s famous bloggers
. He keeps up a frenetic pace of publication - generally focusing on his particular obsessions: American politics, torture, gay rights, the Iraq war, the evils of Islamism, the evils of the Christian right.
In his new book he focuses on the nature of conservatism. A key part of the argument is that in the United States, the Reaganite conservative tradition which focused on liberty and small government has been subverted by the growing power of Christian fundamentalism over the Republican party. Sullivan calls George W. Bush "the most powerful Christian fundamentalist in the world." While traditional conservatism is a humble creed, based on an awareness of the imperfection of human knowledge, Christian fundamentalism is characterised by a dangerous certainty.

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