More mega-comment web-factories are appearing, before our very eyes.

Here is Iain Dale’s new Dale & Co. site, a self-styled current affairs mega-blog. I of course immediately click on World Affairs, and what do I find?

Not much, including this curious little piece by one James Chartlton (sic), a trainee journalist whose "proudest achievement to date is a 5th place finish in the 2006 ‘Christleton to Waverton’ fun run".

Mr Chartlton helpfully gives us his expert views on why the UK should admire Germany: football, Eurovision, federal system, timely trains and so on. Turbo-charged Fifth-form analysis.

Moving up a clear gear we find former Tribune Editor Mark Seddon arguing that the UK will have a major EU referendum in the next five years:

There will be a referendum on Britain’s whole relationship with the European Union within five years. I’m prepared to break the habit of a life time and go to the bookies to lay a bet to that effect. 

It is not that I am anti European, or a ‘little Englander ‘– far from it. But clearly the institution has grown and changed to such a degree and more importantly seeks to accrue yet more powers at a time when global recession means that it has not a great deal to offer in return, that popular will in this country may soon dictate that there has to be a referendum.

Will I be right? Who knows? The trouble is that once this out there there can be no rowing back. I hope that I am.

The Dale & Co. contributors en masse look like a very respectable, safe, mainly Westminstery insider, establishment-pundity group, with perhaps the distinguished exception of punchy Anna Raccoon, whose secret identity is at last revealed here.

Meanwhile another commentary behemoth but with added News has emerged, The Huffington Post UK.

This one looks bigger and intellectually heavier, but also more obviously left-liberal: it even has squeaks from Ed Miliband here and there.

And there’s a contribution from HM Ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald:

A Golden Welcome for Will and Kate

Their Royal Highnesses’ visit to LA this week will bring to the fore some of the most important practical aspects of a relationship which the president, six weeks ago, rightly described as "essential" as well as "special." The Duke and Duchess will attend a job fair that is intended to help US military personnel to reintegrate into civilian life.

Hmm. Over lunch I was chatting to a former senior UK intelligence officer about the fact that the Americans had had to hold back from us key intelligence information for fear of it being the subject of legal challenge in UK courts.

Then there is The Commentator, an openly conservative-minded site primarily offering fresh perspectives on issues of civilisational importance. Growing nicely but not (yet) with the scale/ambition of the first two.

Basically, we are all sinking in a growing, sprawling swamp of Comment (to which this website contributes its own little portions, although I do at least try to attach some of what I write to operational experience and reliable information) which feeds on an ever-diminishing shared organised basis for Facts and what used to be called ‘hard news’.

It’s almost as though we all expect facts and news miraculously to appear on their own, perhaps from massed social networks such as Twitter (with whatever checking mechanisms they may or may not offer), so that everyone can then grandly pile in with ever-more noisy (and often simply ignorant but no less noisy) opinions.

All in all, a growing if not towering babbling incoherence on a scale which makes rational government and intelligent adult discussion almost impossible. In all this clamour the News of the World drama is merely another MSM death-spasm, a further example of a networked swarm effect abruptly devouring an established and hitherto formidable organisation which this time round happens to be a media force but in fact could be almost anything.

Back to the eighteenth century?