This piece was in yesterday’s Crikey email.
Are Australia’s political blogs there yet? “Are we there yet?” is a question you often hear asked at seminars on new media these days. It refers to blogs. Nobody is really sure where âthereâ? is, but the question is generally understood to be whether or not blogs have a real impact â whether they can influence public opinion, and whether, as they have in the United States, they can affect election results. Usually the answer is something like “no, but weâre getting there.” And today the left-leaning Larvatus Prodeo, which claims to be the countryâs best read political blog, has released statistics which suggest that might be true. LP claims to have had 31,612 unique visitors in October â showing steady growth from January, when it was just 17,148. The increases have probably been driven by Mark Bahnischâs blogging on the Queensland election, (his best stats were in August, with over 32,000 unique visitors) some of which was also run on Crikey and other sites. He is now putting a consistent effort into recruiting bloggers for the Victorian state election. To put this in perspective, the monthly figures mean that LP is comparable with most small politically inclined magazines. The Monthly, for example, is generally thought to sell about 16,000. The Bulletin claims around 80,000. Of course there is probably more than one reader for each issue of a hard copy publication. And it is doubtful whether LPâs readers are swinging voters. Nevertheless, at its best (which is not every day) LP runs perspectives and analysis as good as you find on the op ed pages, and on a wider range of issues than they can cater for. Its figures suggest that “getting there” is about right. — Margaret Simons
I’ve asked for a correction to “one of the best read blogs” as I’m aware that Tim Blair’s readership is higher than ours. But I’m really pleased with the growth we’ve enjoyed over the year.
I think Lisa and Bart put it best,
Mark: “…Iâve asked for a correction to âone of the best read blogs…â?
Well, if one were to make a distinction between “best”-read and “most”-read, then… [Either way, kudos.]
Just discriminatin’. [And congratulatin'.]
keep up the nocturnal perambulations…resist the urge to tumble into the pile of cash…be the storytellers of the resistance & the ‘we thought we had it all under control’…fear not the dancer, nor the couch potato head, observe their love making…from the wild side to the next kitchen of distinction…drive…fly…ride…slide…beyond the blue event horizon…
are we there yet??????
yer doin fine LP…collective…& individuals…
but you already know that…:)
Just curious, does anyone know roughly what Crikey’s readership is?
A few points:
Thanks to Margaret Simons for the nice words about the general quality and variety of LP posts.
I don’t know where ‘there’ is either (though with Gertrude Stein I would probably suggest that there may turn out to be ‘no there there’) but I suspect & hope blogging is about a lot more than affecting election results or ‘fact checking journalists’ arses’ as some have put it. I for one would be terribly disappointed to see Australian political blogging get too much like the 700 word op-ed template. It’s the range of genres and formats as well as the range of opinions and analytical perspectives that makes blog-reading worthwhile and gives it a potential edge over mainstream media.
On the question of numbers and influence, I think it is quite impossible to sustain a meaningful comparison between the circulation figures of a publication like The Monthly and the ‘unique visitors’ count on a blog like LP. The raw numbers for blogs don’t mean what they look like they mean. They don’t take into account any of the cumulative effects of the Long Tail; they don’t distinguish between random one-time googlers trying to discover whether Missy Higgins lipsnigs and regular daily readers of the front page; and they don’t even begin to take into account whackier but potentially significant factors like whether the readers of a particular blog are big consumers of online porn on shared computers – if you blow your cache and cookies each time you close your browser, the tracker will count you as a different visitor each session.
The numbers don’t mean what they appear to mean, but they do mean something. A more accurate picture of what blogs are really finding ‘readerships’ in the traditional sense in the Australian blogosphere would have to take into account other indicators like the number of subscribers to RSS feeds and especially link citations from other websites as collected by technorati, gnoos, ttlb etc.
I’m confused by how to parse the phraseology of âone of the best read blogsâ?. Does that mean:
1. “one of the (best read) blogs”, i.e, one of the blogs that it is best for one to read?
2. “one of the best (read blogs)”?, i.e., one of the best of the blogs that people actually read?
or is it a dictation error for:
3. “one of the best red blogs”?
Maybe it’s a typo for one of the best purple blogs?
Laura: “…I for one would be terribly disappointed to see Australian political blogging get too much like the 700 word op-ed template. It’s the range of genres and formats as well as the range of opinions and analytical perspectives that makes blog-reading worthwhile and gives it a potential edge over mainstream media…”
Which reminds me of another line of Gertrude Stein, which also happens to be my favorite of hers…
“One day a man was dragging his father by the heels through the orchard. ‘Stop! Stop!’ the old man cried in horror. ‘I myself did not drag my own father as far as this tree…’”
Apparently now I’m in moderation, for quoting Gertrude Stein. New moments in weirdness.
A spaminator in a spam for a doing of the tool. Writing with the filter of suchness. A spam is a ham is a spiced ham in Hawaii. It filters a spice. A price of a ham can be had with a man for a nator with or without spice. And so it could be those ways.
Hey, this is fun! Is there a Stein-bot simulator out there on the web somewhere?