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!
Archive for the 'Notices' Category
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.
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).
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?’
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.
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).
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’
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.
Just a quick plug - via the LP facebook group - for our friends at sQuareOne, who have a number of events coming up in Sydney targeted to people interested in independent publishing and freelance writing and blogging.
sQuareOne is a project of independent non-profit youth media and arts organisation Vibewire Inc. Vibewire exists to create communications platforms that facilitate and encourage young Australians aged 15 to 30 to express themselves on the issues that matter to them.
Check out what’s happening here.
Beneath the fold is the regular repost of the LP comments policy. All commenters are asked to read the comments policy before posting and abide by the policy on threads. In light of recent discussions, please also note this comment.
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m speaking on Sunday at a forum organised by the Search Foundation in Brisbane. The idea is to discuss how we in the left might formulate some objectives that transcend both particular campaigns and electoral politics - in short, an exercise in re-envisioning goals. I’m circulating my paper in advance of the meeting, and I’ll be talking to it rather than reading it, but since there was some interest on the previous thread, I’m also posting a link here. [pdf]
I’m looking at a subsequent magazine publication, so any feedback and discussion is greatly appreciated, and as I’ll be extemporising around the text on Sunday, I’d also be delighted to incorporate any constructive comment in the talk itself.
As well as hosting public fora, one other thing LP is up to is facilitating conversation in livespace. I want to get away from the whole “meet a visiting blogger and get trashed” thing and more towards the have a few quiet Sunday drinks and have a convo thing. If you’re interested, and in Brisbane on Sunday, we’ll be at Kaliber in the TCB Building on the Brunswick Street Mall from 4pm. As Nabs might (just) recall, they do good cocktail. And there’s a band, but also outside seating where you can have a chat.
A bit more notice has been given of this event via Facebook, and it really is convenient for organising stuff - for instance, if there’s a late change in plans, it’s easy to contact all attendees quickly. So do please sign up for the FB group if you think you’d be interested in such events and other fora in future.
If anybody wants to organise something under the LP banner in their own town, give us a shout (as Brendan Nelson would say).
is coming soon. Looks very spiffy. [Via Rachel Hills]
The Search Foundation is holding a series of roundtables in capital cities leading up to a national conference in 2009. The idea is to stimulate discussion in order to contribute to a reimagination of the objectives of the left in Australia. I’m speaking at the Brisbane event on April 20. Prelimary details available at this link:
flyer-and-program-for-brisbane-roundtable-april-20.pdf
I think this sort of thing is fabulous - it’s very easy to lose sight of longer term goals and the necessity of developing both a realistic critique of Australian society and aims which go beyond the necessary every day struggles for various causes or for electoral victory. So I hope and trust it will be very worthwhile.
The event is invitation only, but if you’d like to be put on the invite list, please email Rachael Jacobs at this address.
The question was answered in this post.
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