Tag Archive for 'Larvatus prodeo'

Rudd on Qanda open thread

The first Q&A for the year features Kevin Rudd and an audience of yoof in Old Parliament House (no doubt screened according to approved Abetz principles to include quotas of Young Libs, LaRoucheites, etc).

I won’t be liveblogging it, because of the delay caused by the lack of daylight saving in Queensland. But here’s an open thread should you wish to comment.

No doubt there will also be a lively discussion on Twitter at #qanda. [And just a reminder that LP is on Twitter, and the new new Facebook, for that matter. If you are too, we'd love you to join us elsewhere in the social media-verse!]

LP on Facebook and Twitter

As Phil observed recently, LP has joined the Twittersphere. We can be found here.

We’ve also revamped our Facebook presence, supplementing and eventually replacing our group with an FB Page. As many of you will know, pages offer better functionality – with wall posts appearing in people’s live feed. And they avoid the weird FB rule that you can’t be in more than 300 groups (what is with that?)…

So we’d love to see you in these other nodes of the social media thang!

Update: The Facebook page now has a simplified url. Find us here.

LP on Twitter

Yes, LP is now Twittering. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.

Heck you can’t avoid it now that it’s become the favourite plaything of the mainstream media. In fact it appears whole conferences are dedicated to Twitter – participants seemingly unable to talk about anything else.

As some of you may know I’ve been Tweeting my head off for a few years now, and jumping on and off the bandwagon. Now it’s become a part of the daily background hum.

I’m like a lot of web media workers for whom Twitter is now a work tool, but I also use it for a little bit of play, to inform and to annoy, to be annoyed and to be amused.

Lately it’s annoyed the crap out of me because the usual (and not so usual) social media suspects continue to overstate it’s importance. It’s not a replacement for anything, it’s an addition to something which already exists.

Continue reading ‘LP on Twitter’

Quadrant piles on

Not to be outdone by The Australian, Quadrant has launched its own series on the left. This time with non-leftists writing it… And writing about the Australian’s articles. Jason Soon, for instance, along the way to arguing that social justice is a “category mistake” and the basis of “the left’s form of creationism”, takes a swipe at LP as “postmodernist”. News to me. The mis-en-abyme of Quadrant’s deconstruction of putative lefties writing for a right wing op/ed page strikes me as much more properly po/mo. Or maybe it’s a piece of pure Dada-ist modernist absurdism.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the now compulsory comparisons of Julia Gillard et al with the North Korean regime are wheeled out once more, coupled with crazed elisions of a bunch of rather mild social democrats with Stalin and Mao, and paeans to the millions of dead, etc, etc. There’s a certain irony in one of the contributors accusing critics of writing conspiracy theory. Not to mention the argument, if that’s the word for it, that concern with narratives is evidence of postmodernism (evil!) sitting uneasily next to attacks on social democrats for not having a narrative. Anyone remember when the teaching of narrative history was supposed to be a touchstone of John Howard era approved political correctness? Contradiction piled on contradiction…

There’s lots more. Should you not wish to read all of the series, Gary Sauer-Thompson has devoted some time to analysing the introductory piece by Mervyn Bendle. Bendle contributes another article, damning Julia Gillard among others, complete with another clever pun in the title. I thought that was the sort of Derridean wordplay he despised. But anyway…

Related LP posts: Here, here and here.

Elsewhere: Catallaxy.

Update: Skepticlawyer.

Blogging otherwise…

I might have mentioned in passing here, and I know I’ve said on Facebook, that I’ve become interested lately in exploring some themes which don’t really seem to fit into the LP space, and also in a more personal form of blogging, and indeed, a more writerly form of blogging.

One of the issues I’ve been interested in discussing is the complex intersections of the religious, the spiritual and the social. That’s in part from a place based perspective – associated in particular with the continuing life of Saint Mary’s, South Brisbane – and in part from a radical Catholic position. In the process of so doing, I’ve been addressing some themes both personal and philosophical.

I’m not entirely certain the ‘one size fits all’ blog works for this sort of discussion. I’m also not interested in getting into an argument about the existence of God, or whether all religion is evil, or Richard Dawkins, or whatnot. That sort of thing might have its place, but it’s rarely conducted with much intellectual rigour, and it simply doesn’t do anything for me.

Anyway, I write this really just to highlight some of what I’m doing for the benefit of those who enjoy my writing and appreciate my perspective. Continue reading ‘Blogging otherwise…’

Four More Years!

Today is LP’s fourth birthday!

So if you’re feeling in a nostalgic mood, or if you weren’t around way back when, you can check out the first two posts or have a look at a snapshot of where we were and what the place looked like on 21 February 2006, the first point at which the National Library’s Pandora archived us.

Pineapple Party Time!

Folks with long memories might recall I covered the 2006 Queensland election for Crikey. In discussing with the Crikey peeps what might be the best way to go in terms of reporting on and analysis of the 2009 Queensland election, we settled on a dedicated campaign blog – written by me, Possum and The Poll Bludger. The idea is to harness the interactivity and dynamism Crikey has now introduced through its blog network, as opposed to having everything dominated by the timing of the daily email and fixed deadlines. We’re also interested to see how a campaign specific blog goes. I don’t want to enter into yet another boring and misconceived MSM v. blogs debate, and it’s worth noting that compared to, say, the Courier-Mail, we’re targeting a narrower audience much more intensely interested in politics. But I still think it’ll be interesting to assess how this form of campaign coverage goes.

You can find the blog here – Pineapple Party Time!

Posts on PPT will be exclusive there. That’s really because I’ll probably get fairly fired up about the state campaign – since it’s in my neck of the woods and I’m part of that small minority who really does get quite enthused at election time – so I wanted to avoid LP having its front page constantly dominated by Queensland election stuff. The other reason is that – as I said – I’m interested in exploring a number of questions about the viability of event specific blogs in a real time environment. What we’ll be doing here is a daily links post from either me or Kim, which will also provide an open thread for LPers to discuss the Quinceland campaign, post links, speculate, etc, etc. Me aside, all the other LP bloggers who care to are absolutely free to post election stuff here.

There are a couple of cross-posts up at PPT – there to seed it with some comment for the launch announcement in today’s Crikey email. There are also two new posts – one on the Stuart Copeland candidacy in Condamine and the Newspoll and the other on the question of whether the early election will impact on the result – a question that’s somewhat more important than all the rest of the kerfuffle about the early election speculation.

The Australian has better pundits than the blogosphere?

Well, knock me down with a feather! Taking a leaf out of Tim Blair’s book of selective quotation, The Australian has claimed I was the “last to call” the Queensland election. I must say things must have come to a pretty pass when they’re actually moved enough to name a blog they disagree with, rather than use the usual formulations of “ignorant bloggers”, etc, which conveniently don’t allow anyone to google up the blog in question and make up their own minds.

For the record, there’s a basic difference between my approach to punditry and that of the press wizards at the Oz. They wrote stories almost daily for months claiming the election could be called the next day, or the next week, or was “imminent” or whatever. I waited until I actually had firm information – from Labor sources. Not reading the tea leaves or joining the dots with the latest news story and claiming there was now a “trigger” or the government was “under pressure” (from whom, I wondered?)… I’ll stand by the claim that the final decision to go ahead with an early election hadn’t been made until late last week. Any enterprising journos who doubt that might like to, well, investigate – perhaps by contacting people involved in that decision rather than speculating in retrospect. If there were indeed cunning plans afoot which journos can now reveal, whatever stopped them writing about the said cunning plans when they were actually being made and implemented?

To adopt a phrase that’s been around the traps lately with regard to the distinction between bloggers and journos, I picked up the phone. I’m not so sure the pundits did. End of story. Let’s get on with talking about the campaign!

I’d also point out that the method of selective quotation does produce a real (and intended) distortion in the story about what was being said here. That’s no great surprise, but anyone interested in boring old fashioned stuff like the truth can make their own minds up by reading the posts in question in their entirety. They can be accessed via this tag.

LP augmented!

As some may have already noticed, we’ve been joined on an ongoing basis by our two resident NZ election bloggers – Deborah of In a strange land and Idiot/Savant of No Right Turn. [Among other things, we're hoping to promote more cross-Tasman conversation, but there's no topic restriction.] As you will notice in the future, after the sad demise of The Road to Surfdom, Helen of Cast Iron Balcony fame will also be cross-posting from time to time here.

We’re very excited to have these fine folks on board, and hope everyone will welcome them heartily to LP!

LP Christmas drinks – the post!

Yesterday saw simultaneous LP Christmas drinks in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

We Quincelanders had an extremely pleasant and appropriately festive afternoon at Hotel Bravo in the Valley, I thought…

It is of course an internetty tradition to post a thread for post-grogblog reflections, so here it is. Perhaps some of the Sydney and Melbs folk will be along to update.

Continue reading ‘LP Christmas drinks – the post!’

LP Christmas Drinks! Facebook rsvp

santadrinkinguc4.jpgsantadrinkinguc4.jpgsantadrinkinguc4.jpgsantadrinkinguc4.jpg

Folks, if you’re on Facebook, it would be a help if you could rsvp to whichever of the Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne LP Christmas Drinks you plan to attend. All the events can be accessed from this page, and you can join the LP fb group here if you like.

Update: If anyone’s interested in organising drinks somewhere other than BrisSydMelb, let us know asap!

Crikey goes bloggy

I wasn’t the only person to notice on Friday night that Possum, The Poll Bludger and Andrew Bartlett (among others) popped up on a new blog platform at Crikey. One take on this move from Duncan Reilly – writing at The Inquisitr – was that it constitutes “a welcomed step in legitimizing blogging in Australia”. From my point of view, that’s the wrong way round. I very much doubt that any of those bloggers lacked “legitimacy” – Possum’s performance in outgunning the GG crew in the pseph analysis stakes, The Poll Bludger’s hosting of a rolling psephological conversation and the quality of the informational and analytical blogging he does and Andrew Bartlett’s commitment to a transparent and open political debate all have that quality in spades already.

I think what’s more significant here is a recognition from Crikey of a shift from a relatively static form of internet publishing to a more dynamic and interactive one. It’s a better model in some ways than cherry picking bloggers to write static articles, because it encompasses the whole context of the form.

There’s obviously also a commercial element in the decision – frequently updated sites with lively and long comments threads multiply the page views and thus the advertising revenue. And, as with the general trend towards blog networks, it should be possible for Possum and the rest of the mob to earn a modest living from what they do without all the hassles of being their own advertising agent, and to concentrate on the content and the community without being their own tech support. What will be interesting is the degree to which there’ll be a crossover from Crikey “readers” to Crikey blog participants/commenters.

What does this imply for the independent blogosphere? Continue reading ‘Crikey goes bloggy’

Saturday Salon

An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.

Economy tanks, blogs suffer! (or… advertising and readership accountability post)

Here’s our regular update on how the blog is doing. First to the stats.

June was a bumper month for us with 117430 unique visitors, 229301 visits and 1685704 page views. In July, we were back around the sort of reader numbers we had for April with 89496 unique visitors, 195867 visits and 1442702 page views (as Kim noted, more than Andrew Bolt has….) and August looks like coming in at around the same numbers. The drop off from June coincided exactly with the start of the school holidays (and uni break) and then spiked up a little, before settling back down with the onset of the Olympics. More generally, and obviously there’s a tale there, my analysis of the detailed stats shows that we get a fair bit of extra traffic associated with sustained coverage of particular events or issues – for instance the federal budget, the 2020 summit, the Bill Henson photos controversy, the Garnaut Review report and World Youth Day. That seems to be people interested in those specific things, and where we are now is probably just below the usual level of general interest in what we write about – which garners us around 6200 visitors on most week days, and around 5000 on weekends this month. That’s about 1000 less than it was before school/uni holidays and the Olympics intervened.

There was some scepticism around last year that political blogs would not easily make the transition into the Rudd era, in the absence of the stimulus of the federal election, which is when our numbers really jumped to a level that’s reasonably significant. That concern can be set aside, because clearly we’ve maintained a steady readership at around the same levels throughout this year, and when there’s more focus and public interest on particular issues that aren’t being well covered by the mainstream media, we can pull in around 1000 more visitors a day, and sometimes more – there were quite a few days in July when we were getting visitor numbers in the high 8000s. Some of the traffic “base” if you like of all these numbers is the “long tail” – visits to old posts. But in general we’re getting each visitor looking at an average of 7.5 pages, which when you take into account the fact that a lot of the traffic from seach engines to older pages only goes to one post, means that a lot of readers are engaging with a lot of the blog when they come here.

I still think we can grow these numbers, and we haven’t had any income from advertising yet, so we haven’t been able to do our own promotion beyond what we usually do, but I’d be really grateful if folks who like the joint spread the word, and also very interested in feedback on the mix and quality of posts. I’ve said something about the mix here. That takes me to advertising revenue. Continue reading ‘Economy tanks, blogs suffer! (or… advertising and readership accountability post)’