Remember all the agonising when Tim Dunlop shifted from The Road to Surfdom to Blogocracy under the Newscorp banner? And remember all the loud denouncin’ when Mark wrote *one blog post* for the Higher Education Supplement and some were quick to assume that this meant LP was about to be swallowed by the Murdoch beast? Well, they were assured at the time it wouldn’t mean that, but that didn’t stop all the conclusion jumpin’… As it turns out, I think there was an interesting issue of trust raised - and one that went precisely to some people’s false assumptions about what exactly is at stake when bloggers get co-opted. We’ve always argued here that one of the most important reasons for preserving an independent blogosphere is not just analysis and posting without fear or favour but also the distinctly different nature of the community and commenting it can foster - there’s no doubt at all in my mind that the News Ltd blogs, while they’ve been quite successful in occupying some of the space the independent blogosphere might have taken up (and might still take up - watch this space!), can’t replicate the latter. Aside from the fact that there’s probably little loyalty to most individual MSM bloggers and blogs per se (particularly where - as with most of the MSM columnists who “blog”, there’s zero interaction with the audience and commenters are perceived as “the audience”), the whole set up - seemingly arbitrary deletion or non-appearance of comments, strict barriers for defamation and other legal concerns, time lag between comments being posted and appearing - means that it’s very difficult to lift the threads beyond the bulletin board model and foster genuine interaction and community.
So I think - anyway - the real issue here is not any moderation of the bloggers’ own politics, but the literal difference in moderation on MSM blogs.
What’s interesting to me is that this evidently cuts both ways - left and right. Tim Blair has moved his blog over to the Daily Terror website. And his commenters are well aware of what the implications for them are. If you don’t want to read the whole thread, there’s a neat summary at The Blair/Bolt Watch Project.
Update: More from Jason Wilson at gatewatching.
Interesting indeed. I read that thread at Blair’s (well the start of it anyway); the flying monkeys seem to expect that with a bit of good will and co-operation that they’ll be able to import their schtick to Murdoch.
Very different to the condemnathon of the Left.
If you read down, Liam, they very quickly start bemoaning the fact that their days of “free-flowing interaction” will be over, that Andrea won’t be there to bounce dissenters, and that they’ll be bound by “the draconian Australian laws of defamation”. Etc. in the same vein.
There’s also a bit of Rupert hatin’ in that thread.
And if you read through, a big sense of loss.
Yes well the start is all I could take. I’ll give the monkeys credit, they do a lot with a little.
May I also give mad props to Kim for two blog-fight posts in the space of a week. First the sledge on Catallaxy, now Blair. May I suggest Anonymous Lefty be your next target of opportunity?
I don’t read this one as a sledge, Liam!
You’re too quick to look for the stoushin’ opportunities I think!
Two blogs enter
one blog leaves
[grabs hairspray, slices jeans, cuts fingers off gloves]
It’s an odd move by Blair. He surely must be aware of the damage it will do to his blogging “brand”.
It may not be a wholly voluntary move. Newscorp as his employers would have an obvious interest in the traffic that he generates from his blogging brand and the potential ad revenue, so it may well be that the switch came from that side.
Forget brand, it’s about community even if it is one populated by a bunch of nutcases. Yes, their sense of loss is palpable, but what did they expect? Tim is no charity worker, it’s his business.
And good on him for making the move, because if anything was hurting his “brand” it was the company he kept at Spleenville and .net.
Which is of course Kim’s point, I think.
Darn, that was a roundabout comment from me. Too many thoughts flowing at the same time. Two IM’s open, one Twitter, and two blog comments at the same time…..must. focus. on. LP. comments. first!
Actually, now might be the time to get back into the independent blogging space if more of this happens because there may be a need for non affiliated alternative voices. Hmmmm? Maybe independent blogging isn’t dead after all.
Word, Phil!
I’ve heard some interesting stuff in the last couple of weeks which has revised my opinion of the prospects for independent blogging.
I’ve posted over at Gatewatching on this - it will be very, very interesting to watch. It’s interesting that a lot of his user comments (implicitly or explicitly) have addressed the issues of freedom of speech/defamation, and also a necessary opening up of the community to those formerly defined as trolls. So it’s a diminished exclusivity of membership and a simultaneous change to the forms of speech that used to characterise the community. We may need an anthropologist to understand it properly, but it’s no wonder they appear to be in mourning.
It’s going to be a very delicate balancing act for Blair, one would think, and I wonder what the trade-offs are for the loss of immediacy in the community.
Sorry… last sentence: “I wonder if the trade-offs are worth it given the loss of immediacy in the community”.
It says a lot about Spleenville that blog comments on news.com.au are viewed as being overly polite or restrictive.
Oh, no. We can’t call Age et al. columnists halfwits any more. (At least not in e-type.)
8=^(
They don’t know their Fairfax from their Murdochs.
Dills!
May I also point out that it’s spelled “Oh noes!”
Lessons learnt from RTS thread
1) shifting the political arena can force opportunistic media moguls to tolerate views they can’t usually stomach…particularly when money is involved.
2) time & ad revenue will see how long this symbiotic relationship lasts. For Tim’s sake & ours I hope he has helped change News Ltd. for a good long time.
3) Tim Dunlop is a persuasive character & is adept at attracting readers based on his reasoned & calm approach to issues. Also a nice guy. Obviously worth hiring if you need to shore up your profits after spending heaps on acquiring risky propositions and ventures.
4) commentors shouldn’t be condescendingly referred to as loonies because their opinions differ to yours…leave those labels for the war manufacturers…:) Also, bloggers are not GODS, nor are they superior because they pay the bulk of the bills, sometimes they benefit from the ideas/views/knowledge/imagination of others which assists their blogging…& occasionally income earning process. W/out a readership they might end up as less than humble faux knights searching for windmills. Some are highly talented tho…& make lots of sense & treat commentors w/ respect…like Mark…& Tim D…& Darlene.
5) Don’t drink to the point you become a delusional paranoid.
6) Don’t assume you know Nabakov…:)…particularly when doing #5
7) Using imagination, poetry, humour & filmic/music references etc. can provide continuity & provide motivation & essential mutability for an ever exploring online community. As evidenced here too.
Some good thoughts there, nasking!
Thnx Mark. I enjoy reading most of the topics & comments on this blog. Expands my mind…sparks those little grey cells. But i still stumble now & then. C’est la vite! So much to learn, so little time. Luv Kim’s imagination BTW. and Tig Togs…& plenty of others. Robert writes plenty of insightful pieces. I could go on…but i’m tryin’ to keep it short these days. Tryin’.
Carry on collective….hmmm…sounds like a cool flick.
I can;t say I think it will be interesting to watch Jason, but each to his own.
I think that’s an exceptionally important point, nasking.
Well, Jason gets paid to watch it, Laura! He may mean “interesting if you’re employed on a citizen journalism ARC research project”…
De gustibus non est disputandum, Nasking.
Yes Mark. It’s a bad day for connoisseurs of toxic drivel, infantile abuse, and mental flatulence.
Blair’s blog was the online equivalent of a bunch of pig-rootin’, sister-lovin’ good ol’ boys getting together to suck down some hooch, git riled up, jerk each other off and then find themselves a fag to bash.
Good riddance.
I’m no fan of the flying monkeys, Mercurius, but what I’m really interested in is the parallel when a left or a right community gets subsumed into something bigger and more slow and MSM-like.
Just on the Tim Dunlop thing, I may not have made it clear enough but I was trying to leave enough nuance in my comments about News Ltd blogs to capture a somewhat different approach to the form from Tim Dunlop. Tim has certainly tried to take some of the community/interaction stuff with him, but I think he’s been to some degree hampered by the same sorts of MSM gatekeeping I’ve written about. Tim Blair, by contrast, never interacted much in his own comments threads. You were far more likely to see Timmeh pop up from time to time on other blogs. So Timmeh, to me, sorta lived off the community his blog created rather than with and for it.
Kim, seems to me you’re trying to apply some normative standards to blogging, which I doubt is a fruitful exercise. Blogging is what it is, in all the diverse forms it’s practiced. LP does it one way, Dunlop another, Blair another, ditto every other blog.
One can certainly have a view about what constitutes good or bad blogging. But it’s all blogging and my personal bias is to describe it rather than assess it.
At any rate, the winged monkeys are still free to express their “thoughts”. But without their arch-enabler (I mean Andrea Harris), I doubt whether they’ll have any. Much less any that see the light of day. And, to wax normative for a moment, I am glad for it.
Mercurius, I too am trying to describe rather than assess. My point is that the conditions of possibility for the monkeys to interact as they’re accustomed to are radically reduced by the transition to a heavily moderated MSM domain that closes overnight when the moderator goes home from work. It’s much more a distinction that I’m trying to make between commenting/community independent style and the MSM facsimile thereof than any normative judgement.
And reading the thread at Blair’s they understand that distinction very well indeed.
True TDD…i’ll admit Gonzo made for interesting reading. I’ll just apply that lesson learnt to “moi”.
Hey! you & the Pope would get on marvellously…well, at least you could understand each other. I imagine Bob Carr would also dig a chat. No sarcasm or envy meant. I know there are those who feel more relaxed at Church listening to services in Latin…nostalgia, sense of belonging & such. But for some reason it gives me the creeps. Vēnī, vīdī, vīcī & all that. Genetic memory perhaps…:)
no accounting for taste…as you say….sorta.
So they didn’t need Evil Lefties in the end to shut down their party. Blair pulled the plug himself.
And how quickly some of his most dedicated have turned on him. Also interesting to see the paranoia of some of his clan over the fact news.com.au blogs keep logs of IDs and internet addresses, just in case the moderators miss something that results in defamation claims.
Blair will have to work hard to separate himself from Bolt, considering they both usually post on much the same subjects and already shared a few thousand readers. The online conservative audience in Australia who follow blogs aren’t numerous enough for both of them to get the hundreds of thousands of hits a month that makes Rupert smile if Blair continues to group thinks with Bolt as often as he’s done in the past.
Blair will likely find a big audience if he ramps up the humour. There’s not exactly a lot of funny conservatives in Australia. Intentionally funny, that is.
You’re right Darryl. In his more lucid moments, Blair is capable of some gold-standard humour. It’s wasted on his readers. Pity most conservatives have had their humour gland surgically removed.
“Don’t assume you know Nabakov”
Well I certainly don’t know him that well - even though I am him.
I’m surprised people didn’t see this coming. Tim B has been a hard-nosed and very professional journo first and foremost. (You’ll notice Blair at Spleenville never ever got close to being pinged for defamation despite apparent appearances to the contrary and he’s generally issued brisk and timely corrections when he got it wrong.) He’s always been thinking and operating as a media pro with his eye on the next move.
Now News Corp has offered him the holy grail of blogging - express your shorter sharper blog-shaped opinions on company time and get paid for it too. Probably an extra 15k a year, which I certainly wouldn’t sneeze at.
And like Tim Dunlop he’s attracting the kind of criticism that implicitly implies people outside his regular gang will get to join in without having the right to do so.
Bloggers and their commentators across the spectrum are always talking up how blogging will deliver more and /or replace the MSM. But the moment a blogging identity gets a MSM outlet (with comment threads open to the uninitiated) it’s all Shock! Horror! There goes the Neighbourhood!
It’s not selling out to the MSM, it’s the MSM buying in.
Besides it’ll do Tim B’s regulars a world of good to get out of that sheltered commentshop.
I’m not begrudging Tim the gig. I’m just saying that these things make a difference to the independent blogosphere.
“I’m just saying that these things make a difference to the independent blogosphere.”
Are we not just eventually all pebbles rolled and rattled around an electronic beach by the ebbing and flowing yet ever rising tides of the noosphere?
I’m not!Ssssh, careful they might hear you
It’s a race to the Vital Center
“Well I certainly don’t know him that well - even though I am him.”
Can relate to that.
Are we not just eventually all pebbles rolled and rattled around an electronic beach by the ebbing and flowing yet ever rising tides of the noosphere?
Being reading Yeats lately, Nabokov?
Nice thoughts about Blair’s move, btw.
Tim has an opinion piece on Ramsey on the News website today.
Seems the readers ther are not too impressed with his efforts so far.
#25 Mercurius
Blair’s blog was the online equivalent of a bunch of pig-rootin’, sister-lovin’ good ol’ boys getting together to suck down some hooch, git riled up, jerk each other off and then find themselves a fag to bash.
Or was it like one of those Hollywood teen movies in which the healthy Alpha-male types had all the grrls and the fun, but somehow (in the eyes of the writer, at least) the geek miraculously got the grrl in the finish … (until he woke up)?
I forsee a great disturbance amongst the timblair.net Glibertariat as many severally race off to set up their various home-away-from-home discuss-Tim’s-posts-here-now-that-the-old-place-is-gone sites. I doubt that Andrea for one has what it takes to make such a site work. A time of great Darwinian selection is ahead, methinks.
“Now News Corp has offered him the holy grail of blogging - express your shorter sharper blog-shaped opinions on company time and get paid for it too. Probably an extra 15k a year, which I certainly wouldn’t sneeze at.”
So approximately 15 thousand pieces of silver are what it would take for a man to swing willingly from the Judas Tree.
Seems rather paltry.
Who will be the Aussie blogosphere’s evil right-winger now? Alas, alack, etc.
I imagine that getting rid of the various administrative headaches of running his own site, with the added sweetener of News Ltd paying for the moderation eyeballs as well, would be a bonus hard to go past even if they were only paying him a lesser pittance for the actual blogging.