Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Micro fiction competition!

Published
by
Kim
1 day, 23 hours ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Developing world, Donation challenge, Health, International and Poverty
. 27 Comments

It’s been ages since we’ve done a competition. I’ll donate $300 for the best entry in a microfiction comp to Medecins Sans Frontieres. The idea is to write a story in 300 words or less. Must be prose. No haikus! The theme is “The Postmodern Pirate Queen”. In your story, you must include the phrases “peg leg” and “time streams”. Steampunk is a suggested but not compulsory genre. That’s all!

Suggestions on judging and criteria solicited. And matching donations encouraged! You have til midnight on Saturday.


Portrait of the Queen by *Pirate-Queen on deviantART

Garnaut on tour

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Adelaide, Brisbane, Climate change, Emissions Trading, Garnaut Review, Melbourne and Notices
. 20 Comments

Ross Garnaut will be speaking in mainland capital cities next week about the Garnaut Report. Sydney and Perth are already booked out, but if you’re in Melbourne, Brisbane or Adelaide you can still register. Adelaide’s Tuesday, Melbourne is Wednesday and Brisbane’s Friday. I’ve booked myself a spot for the Brisbane gig.

Details here.

Second Down Under Feminists’ Carnival

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Blogging, Feminism and Notices
. 1 Comment

… has been posted at In A Strange Land.

Q&A Lyonised!

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Media, Notices, Politics and Television
. 34 Comments

We’ve been blogging the ABC’s Q&A a bit around here since its debut. One thing worthy of comment is the inclusion of folks who aren’t “subject area experts” (or aren’t recruited for the show as such - I’m thinking of the lamentable Difference of Opinion) but who bring a fresh perspective beyond that of the usual pollies and talking heads. Julia Zemiro, for instance, who as an averagely informed citizen (and one who seemed to wonder what she was doing there on occasion), was able to call some of the insider crud for what it is during her appearance. And smart young acas like the fabulous Kate Crawford… I haven’t watched the thing religiously - last week, for instance, after catching up with the said Kate Crawford among other things I did at the CCi conference, I was out at the Bowery drinking cocktails while Tim Blair enjoyed his moment of televisual fame. But I’ll certainly be watching tonight because my mate Miriam Lyons, policy impresario and CPD Director and all round excellent person, is in the line up. Go Mim!

A bientot!

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Blogging, Life and Notices
. 61 Comments

I’m feeling a bit burnt out as a blogger, so I’m taking a bit of a break for a while. Apologies if I’ve been a bit over the top at times - I do feel passionately about a lot of what I write about, but maybe I need some time out to get it all in a bit of a broader perspective. There’s a sense in which this blogosphere thing becomes a bit of an entity in itself and has its own dynamics which can be quite negative and can sweep you away if you’re not taking sufficient care. Maybe some times I’ve been a little personal when I shouldn’t have been and I’m sorry for that… Anyway, love youse all!

Now that Pamela Bone is dead…

Published
by
Kim
4 weeks ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Blogging, Crime, Culture Wars, Developing world, Donation challenge, Ethics, Feminism, History, Howardia, Imperialism, International, Iraq, Masculinity, Media, Nationalism, Politics, Polls, Race, Religion, Sexuality, USA, War and Women
. 46 Comments

Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.

But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted Islamic Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)

Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).

You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.

And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’

LP virtual soapbox

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 1 week ago
in Blogging and Notices
. 5 Comments

On another thread, gandhi drew our attention to Possum’s idea about hosting posts people might like to submit from other blogs at his joint. On the principle that the intertubes encourage the theft imitation dissemination of good ideas (in a nice Creative Commons type way of course), we’ve been invited to consider doing the same thing. So we’re gonna have a go at it - maybe once a week for starters. Open to suggestions for a better feature thread title, and also open to suggestions as to how it should work. But, for starters, how about you post a link and a summary of any recent blog post you’ve written or read that you think might deserve highlighting. Comments could also be made, I guess, a la Troppo’s Missing Link, on the substance of the posts themselves. And any input as to whether this is a good idea and whether we should do it regularly, and how we could do it imaginatively are most welcome.

Please note that we’re also always open to guest posts. Please email us via this link if you’re interested.

Gleebooks Haebich event tonight

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Immigration, Indigenous, Notices, Sociology and Sydney
. 3 Comments

Folks might remember I attended my erstwhile colleague Professor Anna Haebich’s book launch earlier this year, and invited her to write a guest post for LP on her book Spinning the Dream. I’ve just received this via email from our friends at Griffith REVIEW. If you’re in Sydney, this event would be well worth attending.

TONIGHT! Wednesday June 11
Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970
gleebooks
upstairs at 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
6.30 for 7pm. $10 / $7 concession. Book gleebooks 02 9660 2333
Multi-award winning historian and author Anna Haebich will be in conversation with Julianne Schultz to discuss the experience of assimilation in Australia. Anna explores how Australians in the 1950s and 60s were challenged by new visions of the nation. Assimilation was heralded as the mechanism to sweep away divisions and exclusions of the past and absorb Aboriginal and new Australians into a common shared way of life. The rhetoric and reality of assimilation was to have a profound and lasting effect on several generations of Australians before it was abandoned in the 70s for multiculturalism. Today a form of ‘retro-assimilation’ has come to haunt public debate on national identity and nationhood. Anna’s new book Spinning the Dream (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) develops some of the ideas she explored in her Griffith REVIEW essays Retro-assimilation (Ed 15: Divided Nation) and A long way back - reflections of a genealogical tourist (Ed 6: Our Global Face).

Is Larvatus Prodeo Australia’s most influential political blog?

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 1 week ago
in Activism, Advertising, Blogging, Notices, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 60 Comments

We’re a bit late to this party, for a number of reasons (no doubt including modesty, but more of that later). Trevor Cook reported last month on some research conducted by Dr Colin McLeod and presented to the MEAA’s Public Affairs Convention. The answer, according to McLeod, is yes. Over at gatewatching, Jason Wilson linked to Cook’s post with this commentary:

I seem to recall that last year that we copped a bit of stick for suggesting that Larvatus Prodeo was an influential blog. This was, of course, partly premised on Axel’s issuecrawler analysis of issue networks in the Australian blogosphere. The value of this analysis was disputed at the time, by other influential bloggers.

We’re certainly not universally popular in the blogosphere as this post indicates. But to forestall the anticipated flood of loud condemnations, it’s worth pausing to examine the nature of the claim being made in McLeod’s and Axel Bruns’ research, and what sort of “influence” they’re measuring, which I’ll do over the fold. I imagine that won’t actually forefend the loud condemnations, because there are a few folks out there who are obsessed with their big swinging hits. No names, no packdrill. They can out themselves by linking here.

I’ll also take the chance to update folks on our advertising performance and site stats for May, which was something of a bumper month for both.

Continue reading ‘Is Larvatus Prodeo Australia’s most influential political blog?’

Blog bug

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Administration
. 3 Comments

For some reason which is currently unclear to me, the recent comments plugin isn’t accessing the contents database and thus nothing is appearing on the sidebar where it normally is. I can’t seem to access the comments database internally either! I’ve contacted our host with a request to sort this out, so please bear with us for a bit.

Update: They’re back! Did anyone else notice anything odd?

Update #2: Here’s what happened, or so I’m told:

The system “temporary space” area was unavailable to the MySQL database backend for a few minutes.

It seems that without access to this area MySQL cannot even reliably read from tables!

Questions on the Bill Henson “sexualisation of children” debate [continued]

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Bill Henson controversy and Notices
. 149 Comments

Bill Henson image from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

This post starts a thread which continues general discussion of the Bill Henson controversy, and replaces what had become a very long thread. Please note that there is now a specific post on the politics of the Bill Henson brouhaha, and comments on that aspect should be made on that thread. This one is for the broader issues canvassed by my previous post.

Update: Brian has a new post up on the issue of the age of consent.

Elsewhere: Very interesting posts from Jason Wilson at gatewatching and Rachel at Mentalization-Positive.

Further update: This thread is now closed, and discussion on the general aspects of the Henson controversy can be continued here.

Blogroll update time

Published
by
Kim
2 months ago
in Administration, Blogging and Notices
. 24 Comments

Folks, we’ve received a number of emails recently from sundry bloggers telling us they’ve moved. I’ve noticed that we really haven’t updated the blogroll for quite some time (the full list is here) and some blogs on it are defunct or inactive. Any suggestions (and don’t be afraid to self promote!) for inclusion and/or deletion (where you know something is no longer there) would be most welcome.

We tend to link to Australian and New Zealand blogs only, and blogs whose politics we’re broadly in sympathy with (needless to say, that doesn’t mean that we don’t think there are good blogs whose politics we disagree with). We also don’t link to MSM blogs, unless the blogger in question came from the independent blogosphere (which in practice means Tim Dunlop). The last thing to note is that we wholeheartedly believe the personal is the political, and seek to take a very broad interpretation of what constitutes a political blog (and remember also that we stray into other areas too).

Burma donation appeal at Troppo

Published
by
Robert Merkel
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Developing world, Disasters and Donation challenge
. 1 Comment

The exact magnitude of the effects of Cyclone Nargis on the people of Bruma remain unclear, and will likely be so for some time. But what we do know already is it’s the biggest natural disaster in the region since the Boxing Day tsunami, and without sufficient and timely aid it will get far worse.

In the aftermath of that earlier disaster, the blogosphere did its bit to help out, notably through the efforts of the good Professor Quiggin, who matched his readers’ donations one-for-one, raising nearly $5000. This time around, Club Troppo and the Professor are trying their hand again:

He is doing the same thing again, this time in collaboration with Club Troppo. We are hoping to persuade readers to give generously in the knowledge that every dollar of disposable income sacrificed translates to nearly four dollars of aid. John will donate fifty cents for every dollar pledged in the comments threads for this post, the comments thread for the twin post at his own site, or by email to John or me. Club Troppo contributors will put in another fifty cents.

Go over to Troppo to find out how to donate. I’m going to put in $100. How about you?

LP advertising revenue and donation accountability post

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Administration, Blogging, Donation challenge, Life and Notices
. 43 Comments

People might remember that I promised on the thread about the introduction of ads on LP to report back on how it was going. We’ve now gone through the first full month of ads, so here’s the report!

The gross revenue we earned during April was $3,434.81. Commission is 50%, with 40% going to the advertising broker, and 10% to the network. So the net is $1717.40. We’re paid on the basis of $18 gross per 1000 ad impressions for each page impression. There are 2.5 ads on each page. Nielsen, which does the measuring, only counts Australian visitors, so while posts such as this one with Chelsea Clinton in the title attract a lot of search engine hits, most of that traffic would be from outside Australia. (Though our server stats suggest the great majority of traffic comes from Australia.) We also only get an ad impression (obviously) where people don’t have an ad-blocker plugin installed, or have disabled the plugin for LP.

I’m going to do a comparison between our server stats and the Nielsen numbers to estimate what proportion of views produce an ad impression, but I’m yet to do so. In the meantime, our server stats show we had 80514 unique visitors in April, 176894 visits, 1175376 page views and 3384784 hits. 46.34 gigabytes of bandwidth was served.

The site upgrade cost us a total of $4118.99. We received generous donations totalling $860, which I’ll be paying to The National Forum now that I have the invoice, and the rest will come out of the advertising revenue - which means in effect that it will take us another month before any of that revenue actually accrues to us. Thanks so much for your help! But I’m going to ask for some more - you might recall that the LP collective had agreed that the revenue would initially be shared between promotion of the blog and some recompense to me, to assist me while I’ve been sacrificing paid work in order to finish my PhD this year. The problem is that I’m still sacrificing the income, but because there’s also a time lag of about 3 months between when we earn the ad revenue and when we get paid, we won’t actually see a cent of it until September! So so far, it’s not really fulfilling that purpose, so if you’d like to contribute to the Mark scholarship fund, me, my landlord and my credit cards will all be really grateful!

Continue reading ‘LP advertising revenue and donation accountability post’

Griffith Review goes “Forward from the Summit”

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Media, Notices and Urbanism
. 11 Comments

Our friends at Griffith Review are holding an event in Brisbane tomorrow at the State Library of Queensland from 1 to 4pm:

The 2020 Summit was just the beginning. The more substantial and critical task is to advance the process by building consensus, by continually developing engagement and cooperation between traditionally divided streams, factions and ideologies. Join us for a free seminar featuring twenty Summit delegates who will report on their impressions from the Summit proceedings and consider pragmatic steps forward to identify and achieve Australia’s goals. Come early to enjoy lunch - your own or from Tognini’s Cafe - outside the State Library’s beautiful new building. Panellists include Julianne Schultz, Michael Wesley, Michael Good, George Williams, Matt Foley and many more.

RSVP here.

Incidentally, my copy of the May edition just arrived in the post. It’s on Cities, and I’m looking forward to a stimulating read as always. We’re hopeful we’ll be able to announce a discount bulk subscription offer for LPers in the not too distant future.