Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Kevin Rudd has started blogging.
There’s some commentary on this development from Stilgherrian and in the Fairfax broadsheets.
Update: Peter Martin observes that the Ruddblog comments policy includes among its lengthy list of prohibitions:
do not post overtly party political comment (eg. reference to candidates, fundraisers, support for political parties).
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As others have said at Stilgherrian pollies blogs are a waste of time, you may as well read their press releases. They are stale and boring.
I can’t envisage Rudd writing in his blog “I am going to talk to Hu Jintao and kick his arse’ or something like that.
I guess he won’t be writing “Hu Jintao Xiao Ren” either..
I would like the PM’s blog much better if it didn’t generate 500 error’s so often. Maybe he should have used wordpress.
Kevin’s Moderation Monitors keep Public Service hours. Sez it all, really.
Stale as week-old fish.
Web 2.0? Never heard of it.
I note with some interest that of the 62 responses last night, while Fielding-style reponses were allowed, not a single one critiqued the CPRS on the basis that it handed out too many free permits, had too lax a target and so forth.
I personally submitted some responses and all were modded out even though all but one exactly observed the conditions (in one I overlooked the rule on links — which were to websites discussing actual modelling of the integration of renewables into the power system, the pumped storage facility at Ben Cruachan, Scotland).
Apparently you’re not allowed to critique (politely and on the basis of scientific knowledge) disinformation by contrarians. I tooka swing at CC&S so that too might have got the post nixed.
When I tried to take another look this morning, the site was down with technical difficulties. It was still down a few minutes ago.
It’s also not immediately obvious how you get to the actual page with the blogs accepted either. Persistence pays off, but if you;re not really determined you probably won’t find it, especially now that it’s down and the clock is ticking until 22 July when it stops (and you exclude non business hours).
Wow! Revolutionary. Pretty soon they’ll be telling us we’re doing it wrong….like the big media guys currently are.
Sounds like uts a bit of a waste of time, from the above comments. And I reckon I’d really get moderated out.
“Mr Rudd, can you explain why the ALP has abandoned its socialist principles?’
“Mr. Rudd, why is your Government so far up the coal industry’s arse you can’t see daylight?’
Now I don’t think they’d publish such questions, let alone answer them.
“the site was down with technical difficulties.”
“…if it didn’t generate 500 error’s so often. Maybe he should have used wordpress.”
Someone probably suggested there would be brownie points if they used open source, so some Canberran Drupal geeks got the gig: OPC, from the source code … they’ve got Tanner’s sites contracts, and finance and deregulation has carriage of the whole gov’t 2.0 putsch. Hiving off the PM’s PR2.0 machine to Lindsay Tanner’s budget (instead of that of PM&C) would be the sort mildly shifty thing Kev would do. He’s got to save his money for the Community Cabinet Roadshow extravaganzas. Flying just about the entire cabinet around the country, and public service HOD’s and secretaries, every few weeks: that’s an expensive business.
Why they didn’t just go with the atlassian confluence platform so much money has been put into over the years, and which was specifically tasked with providing interoperability across gov’t, and scale, (and does it well, atlassian are market leaders, an oz software engineering success story,) I don’t know. Except for the opensource brownie points factor maybe.
I see Therese gets a big gurnsey showing how busy she is, so the site is a family affair: the family that blogs together….
The ‘blog’ looks more like a forum to me. I got modded out too, for breaching the terms of use. Maybe I should have read them. I thought it might have been for suggesting the a certain Senator was stupid, in response to a comment on his cherry-picked graph. Maybe it was the links, but I thought it was an informed and sensible response to the rant of Changing Votes (Jul 16th, 2009 at 3:17 pm). I did get one comment through, but I doubt I’ll bother again.
Update: Peter Martin observes that the Ruddblog comments policy includes among its lengthy list of prohibitions:
My comment was called spam and disallowed. I’m guessing it was the reference to 350 but really, I haven’t managed to be so innocuous for ages – and it was still too edgy.
“do not post overtly party political comment (eg. reference to candidates, fundraisers, support for political parties).”
Well thank heavens for that; my Lord the Archbishop nearly fainted when it was tentatively suggested that a blog by a politician might deal inter alia with political items. Luckily, we were able to show him the house rules, and revive his flagging spirits with a glass of water.
Drupal running on IIS, by the looks of it. That sort of undermines the whole opensource feelgood angle.
You have to join up to read the blog? Why?
What’s his pick for the Masterchef winner?
Well, it hardly matters now that Chris is gone Helen.
It’s either the flakey panic merchant who at her best produces odd, but pretty looking food or the flakey panic merchant who at her best produces unchallenging, but satisfying food.
Either way, nobody who could be accused of having actual real-world chef-in-a-kitchen potential.
I’m sure Rudd understands this, hence his diplomatic, inscrutable silence on the matter.
@Helen (13): You don’t have to register just to read the PM’s blog, but hey that’s the impression I got too when I first read the rules.
I also wrote about this for Crikey: Ruddblog: populist masterstroke or full of fail?
Interesting, I had igven it the benefit of the doubt until I read this. Thought it was something to do with my computer or whatever that I was allowed to read the blog, but my first comment – a totally inoffensive critique of the CPRS – was modded out and ever since then, every time I try to log in to post a comment, it gives me this error message:
HTTP Error 500.0 – Internal Server Error
C:\php\php-cgi.exe – The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout
Not impressed. Greensblog ain’t fancy, but at least we don’t stuff around with comments. And we interact with commenters!
Yes, but Tim, you’re actually interested in what others have to say.
Kev is actually in a live chat with 20 lucky punters rapping on Climate change right now:
If you like to watch:
http://pmtv.chat.viostream.com/chat/indexpiesstrazy.php#
Kevin Rudd has started blogging.
.
Oh really? Wow! That’s very, yawn, interesting and I’ll be sure to keep, yawn, reading Mr Rudd’s views on zzzzz
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Fran Barlow @4, good on you Fran! At least you tried.
This cynic has lost faith in any direct attempts to discuss things with pollies. It seems to me that they only sit up and pay attention if an item looks like it has mass support and significant votes in it. Individual appeals to logic and reason don’t seem to cut much ice.
Just saw Penny Wong’s address to the Press Club on ETS. She made perfect logical sense in the first half of the talk – defining the problem we face, the economic and social impacts, the argument for action now, etc. Then she got to the “how do we solve it” part, and reverted to pure politics. No discussion of what the ETS will actually do, but a lot of coalition-bashing, Turnbull-bashing, denialist-bashing etc.
Veiled threats to the opposition about what Labor would do (i.e. implied Double Dissolution) if they didn’t get it passed. Point-Blank refusal to contemplate any alternatives or amendments.
Very poor. In fact, EXTREMELY poorly argued.
At a time when the majority of people polled say that they don’t understand what ETS will involve, Wong implies that she doesn’t need to explain any details. More-or-less “Take it or leave it. And by the way, you WILL be doing it our way…”
Sounds like Hugo Chavez. So what was the role of a Senate in a Democracy? Rubber stamp, was it?
If the Rudd government uses this to force a DD on the electorate, rather than considering any amendments, then I sincerely hope that the electorate forces THEM to explain themselves properly about their scheme.
If it is important enough an issue, for them to bring the country to a halt, then it is certainly important enough for them to convince the electorate that their scheme is the best answer.
If they don’t, then they deserve to get chucked out for playing politics with the issue.
Elsie, there’s no way known the govt will actually have a DD. They’re just using the threat of it to belt the opposition around. The coalition would lose a lot more through a DD that the govt would. (The politics of this are pretty disappointing, I agree.)
David @22, “The coalition would lose a lot more through a DD that the govt would.”
Not quite sure I follow your line of reasoning there.
Say they go the DD. Upside for Rudd is extra seats and a rubber stamp parliament – always desirable for a PM, and especially if one is a control freak. Downside for Rudd is, umm, bugger-all change?
All upside, no downside?
Even a non-gambler might be pursuaded with those sort of outcomes…
Elise
The DD allows Rudd to get the new senators early but they go early too ..
A half senate allows Rudd to get more senators AND have them start late and finish later. The greens do a little worse than in A DD (but still improve) but what they get they will probably pick up at the expense of the right …
As a Green, I’d love the govt to go for a DD, and that’s a lot of the reason they won’t (although hopefully after the next election they’ll be negotiating with us for everything anyway).