As folks who’ve been hanging around the ’sphere for some time will know, I cop a fair bit of flack from RWDBs over the fact that, before we came to the final week of the last federal election campaign, I picked Mark Latham to win. The flack always strikes me as over the top, given that, among many others, the Master of Spleenville himself picked Latham; although in retrospect it’s also a little embarrassing, given that Latham was, or has since gone, troppo. I was therefore perversely comforted in my ongoing political misery to read in “Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?” by Lakshmi Chaudhry, from In These Times, that “no candidate backed by the most popular progressive blogs has yet won an election”. The article is a go read for a round-up of recent US blog literature and chat about trends.
20 Responses to “Netroots”
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I wish I’d seen this yesterday, Chris, when I was working on an article for the TASA newsletter Nexus on blogging and politics.
On Latho, what’s with this?
Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks. ‘You don’t know how such a life tries a man like Kurtz,’
Ha!
Yeah, it’s weird stuff in the Western Sydney Heart of Darkness!
Anyone with small children should not be required to explain domestic decor. Perhaps it was a paper mache focused age-appropriate craft activity?
Ayatollah Khomeni scarecrows are common round where I live. You mean you people have never seen one before?
Amanda, I’m told that the Ayatollah Khomeiny effigies in your neighbourhood are not scarecrows but are erected to deter herds of elephants from trampling the flowerbeds.
…no candidate backed by the most popular progressive blogs has yet won an election.
And no Wallabies coach.
…no candidate backed by the most popular progressive blogs has yet won an election.
I dunno, the guy we endorsed in the local council election last year got up. But then our pissy little local blog is neither popular nor progressive…I think.
And yours is all aligned funny, Mark.
*peers through weird wavy shit*
In happier news, WE HAVE BLOGGER!
Wtf? that’s really odd! I deleted it because something very strange was happening - it was kinda tabbed out from the margin right below Laura’s comment.
My comment was: “I think the last bit of your comment is missing, Laura.”
Is Latho using secret brain rays to throw our discussion of course? Tilt it to the right?
I’ll just go and stick another pin in my effigy to get things back to normal.
Oh, dear, Zoe, now your comment is aligned funny.
Laura must have inadvertently posted a comment at the singularity point of the blogosphere black hole or something.
I give up. Latho is definitely oppressing us via mind control techniques.
Nah, not Latho. It’s coke.
Zeroed in on the nub of the matter, Zoe.
Apparently the spooky Latho hex was actually a missing apostrophe.
Oi! Lay off Currency. My confidence in the Wallaby brain’s trust picking an old prop from Banana Land to coach the national team is a very delicate matter. Latho, I dread, might prove not to have a monopoly on madness. At any rate, I trust you’ve steeled yourself for a drubbing up there at Ballymore on Saturday night. Bring it on!
Connolly was a smidgen out of left field, I’ll grant you that.
cs - re you and Latham:
“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
and / or
“An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.”
Pass.
” I picked Mark Latham to win.”
So did I. In fact I vaguely recall observing at BP, on election eve, that he’d “grown on me” but if you ever locate it in the archives I’d ask that you add “like a plantar wart” to the comment.
There’s an interesting point in the article that the (political) blogosphere replicates the offline world. There are likely a few hundred thousand blogs in this country that talk about politics, but less than one-tenth of one percent of them account for more than 99 percent of all political blogging traffic.
The A list gets listened to, the vast bulk struggles in virtual silence. Just like real life.
Yes Amanda, I thought this also a good line:
As one of the top women bloggers, Chris Nolan, noted on the PressThink blog, “The barrier to entry in this new business isn’t getting published; anyone can do that. The barrier to entry is finding an audience.�