Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Class and Big Brother 2008

Published
by
Kim
2 days, 14 hours ago
in Astroturf, Big Brother 2008, Blogging, Consumerism, Culture, Politics, Relationships, Sociology, Television and Women
. 94 Comments

You can’t talk about Big Brother without talking about class, it seems. Over at Troppo, Ken Parish, who should be familiar with the BB concept of the grenade lob, lobs one in comments:

Far from being careful, I’ll throw petrol on the fire. I think the phenomenon of people who should have more taste and intelligence professing to like BB is just a pretentious affectation, like ending a post with “just sayin’”. Then again, all these shows (including Ladettes to Ladies and the assorted Gordon Ramsey shows) have a certain macabre fascination, sort of like not being able to resist looking at a particularly gruesome car smash as you drive past.

The really vexing thing is that these shows are also a calculated cost-saving gambit by the free-to-air channels. It doesn’t cost all that much to make them because they don’t have to pay the actors. A truly principled lefty would boycott them (although, as Jen pointed out last night, you can make a similar point about the employment effects of blogging on professional journalists).

I don’t know about the logic of boycotting tv shows for political reasons - I suspect it’s only ever invoked in this sort of context, and one could counter with the fact that a lot of writers and other “creatives” get employed by these mega shows (which are actually far more expensive to produce, but also more lucrative, than a lot of the cut-price free to air drama that’s around). And Corey Delaney is Worth(ington) 10 grand a show apparently. Though there’d be an interesting angle in thinking about how “creatives”, anyway, are self-exploiting - freed of career paths, permanent employment, and all those other things that go with not being a contract for hire and an entrepreneurial micro-business. And the lack of reflexivity that comes with seeing one’s endeavours as a big quest for that one big break has uncanny parallels with the show’s refusal of any solidarity to its Housemates. But, whatever, Ken probably thinks I’m displaying an “affectation” - while I think that the BB hatin’ *and actually I don’t enjoy this season, I just find it interesting* is a classic “that’s for the Bogans” Distinction. Proper people, of course, go to the theatre, dahling.

In a way, though, it was ironic that John Howard was a BB hater, because the Inmates couldn’t be more aspirational and individualistic. Some might even drive utes, and you can bet they’re big alcopop drinkers. I’m sure Brendan probably feels their pain. (And I’m sure that he’d probably jump at the chance to be an intruder. Might be useful training for all those frontbench wars.) But class is at issue within the House too, as another excellent post from Eye on Big Brother shows. Continue reading ‘Class and Big Brother 2008′

Bloggers united for human rights

Published
by
suz
3 days ago
in Activism, Blogging, International and The Web
. 4 Comments

It’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. Here’s a quick focus on two blogs/bloggers:

- Burmese Bloggers Without Borders is an independent voice reaching out to the rest of the world. In March they highlighted the case of two Rangoon journalists who were imprisoned. Amnesty International has also taken up the case of Thet Zin and Sein Win Maung.

- Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer has been in prison for over a year now, for writing about political repression, religious extremism and discrimination against women. Amnesty is also working for his release.

Liveblogging Budget 2008

Published
by
Mark
4 days, 22 hours ago
in Blogging, Budget 2008, Economics, Media and Polls
. 31 Comments

I’m going to have a go at it. I’ll leave comments closed on this post until 7pm-ish. Until then, comments can be left on Rob’s speculation thread. Once the liveblogging starts, remember to refresh periodically to see the updates, and please leave your own updates in comments.

A thought to start off with - the lack of a “budget bounce” for the Coalition in recent years led to (accurate, I think) commentary that the importance of the budget as a political event had been massively overplayed. This year, everyone knows the tax cuts are coming, and it’s a much more complex messaging/communications event - as Bernard Keane captures in this piece at Crikey, noting that the leaks have been finely targeted to particular publications covering particular demographics (for instance, “soak the rich” going to the tabloids, climate change for the Sunday Fairfax papers):

Crikey and others have been lamenting the Government’s mixed Budget messages, but we were missing the point. The messages were only mixed for the commentariat itself, which analyses everything the Government says. The media diet of most people is far more limited, and they would’ve only heard what the Government targeted at them.

Similarly, speculation that the budget will establish or damage the Rudd government’s “economic management” credentials is another elite preoccupation. As demonstrated by Kim in this post, that famous phrase is a piece of bad polling anyway - literally asking the wrong question, with endless narratives built on something that has nothing to do with how people vote. It’s much more likely that people are awaiting evidence that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan will do their utmost to protect them from economic uncertainty, than that there’ll be some sort of collective scoring exercise on what is increasingly a very niche piece of political theatre. The Opposition probably know this as well - though they’re caught in the headlights having set Brendan Nelson up as a bunny who’ll need to perform or face the consequences. They should be much more worried about the polling that demonstrates that “welfare for all, not just the poor” is going down like a lead balloon even among their own voters.

Elsewhere: Riffing off Kim riffing off Zoe’s crystal ball liveblogging, tigtog proposes a budget drinking game. Demonstrating the odd time sense that surrounds budget night, Zoe reports on reports of struggling working families with babies earning more than $150000 already bemoaning how they’ll find it hard to make do without the nanny state. And Trevor Cook deconstructs some of the spin about the budget that’s been going on for quite some time already.

Update: GreensBlog will also be liveblogging from 7.30pm.

Further update: Comments now open. Liveblogging will start below the fold at 7.30pm.

Continue reading ‘Liveblogging Budget 2008′

As Homer Simpson says…

Published
by
Kim
5 days, 15 hours ago
in Blogging, Budget 2008 and Life-Levity
. 0 Comments

…”Lisa, you know you can’t change the future!”

Zoe liveblogs the budget on the night before.

7:49 Partially or Somewhat Working Families who wish to become Fully Functioning Working Families will be encouraged and supported. With cash. Non Working but Caring Families will get some more help.

7:51 No more baby bonus for the toffs! No matter, they’ve already got a plasma telly. What’s this - childcare rebates through the roof! Non Indigenous parents who are on welfare won’t get the rebate because they are not Working Families and don’t use childcare. They may be send to the naughty step clutching their debit card just like the Indigenous parents because they are not Working Families either we are not racialists.

There’s much more at her joint.

Cuts both ways

Published
by
Kim
5 days, 21 hours ago
in Blogging, Media and Politics
. 42 Comments

Remember all the agonising when Tim Dunlop shifted from The Road to Surfdom to Blogocracy under the Newscorp banner? And remember all the loud denouncin’ when Mark wrote *one blog post* for the Higher Education Supplement and some were quick to assume that this meant LP was about to be swallowed by the Murdoch beast? Well, they were assured at the time it wouldn’t mean that, but that didn’t stop all the conclusion jumpin’… As it turns out, I think there was an interesting issue of trust raised - and one that went precisely to some people’s false assumptions about what exactly is at stake when bloggers get co-opted. We’ve always argued here that one of the most important reasons for preserving an independent blogosphere is not just analysis and posting without fear or favour but also the distinctly different nature of the community and commenting it can foster - there’s no doubt at all in my mind that the News Ltd blogs, while they’ve been quite successful in occupying some of the space the independent blogosphere might have taken up (and might still take up - watch this space!), can’t replicate the latter. Aside from the fact that there’s probably little loyalty to most individual MSM bloggers and blogs per se (particularly where - as with most of the MSM columnists who “blog”, there’s zero interaction with the audience and commenters are perceived as “the audience”), the whole set up - seemingly arbitrary deletion or non-appearance of comments, strict barriers for defamation and other legal concerns, time lag between comments being posted and appearing - means that it’s very difficult to lift the threads beyond the bulletin board model and foster genuine interaction and community.

So I think - anyway - the real issue here is not any moderation of the bloggers’ own politics, but the literal difference in moderation on MSM blogs.

What’s interesting to me is that this evidently cuts both ways - left and right. Tim Blair has moved his blog over to the Daily Terror website. And his commenters are well aware of what the implications for them are. If you don’t want to read the whole thread, there’s a neat summary at The Blair/Bolt Watch Project.

Update: More from Jason Wilson at gatewatching.

Look familiar?

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 2 days ago
in Advertising, Blogging and Queensland
. 17 Comments

I’m pretty sure, as I’ve mentioned before, that I was the first to dub Queensland’s National Party leader the Borg when I was covering the Queensland state campaign for Crikey in 2006.

Now have a look at Laurence’s new website banner.

He’s stolen our bridge!

Note also the Liberal blue. The Nationals’ Green is entirely absent from his increasingly self-centred branding. And he’s obviously trying to position himself as an urban (and urbane) man. Sharp suit, no tie in a lot of the pics, new haircut, and symbols of Brisbane surrounding him constantly. The moleskins and the rural signifiers have been banished.

Tracking urban eccentrics

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 2 days ago
in Blogging, Brisbane, Sociology, The Web and Urbanism
. 45 Comments

There’s a really fascinating article at Wired about blogs and websites tracking down urban eccentrics. You know who I mean. In Brisbane, I can think of “Rock & Roll George”, the Marilyn Monroe woman (always impeccably groomed), the evil homeless guy who hits people with his umbrella, the plastic bag man who used to sleep outside the Anglican church in Toowong, the fake nun in the white tuxedo who pushed an empty wheelchair down the middle of New Farm streets for many years, and the cowboy whom I once overheard refusing at Rics to explain to the barwoman why he was what he was or who he was, all the while conscious of his minor celebrity.

The article doesn’t cover stalking or the right to privacy, which raises some questions. It also doesn’t really adequately get to grips with the sociological phenomenon of why we talk about such folks and what they feel about it all. Any thoughts?

Legal eagles take flight

Published
by
Kim
1 week, 3 days ago
in Blogging and Law
. 33 Comments

… to establish a new star in the Ozblogging firmament.

Helen Dale aka skepticlawyer and Legal Eagle have teamed up to start a new blog - skepticlawyer by name.

Helen explains her rationale at Catallaxy. She doesn’t reflect on her old digs, and the following represents my opinion not hers. But having witnessed the degeneration of Catallaxian comments threads over recent years - yes, folks, once upon a time you could go over there and have an intelligent argument with the libertarians without being told you were a LIAR and a taxeater, being threatened with horsewhipping, having to endure reading your way around hundreds of piffle filled comments of hyperbolic idiocy, etc. - it’s a move I’m pleased she made! Although Helen’s politics aren’t to everyone’s taste, I don’t think there’s much disagreement that she’s got a fine analytical mind and can turn a neat phrase, so I am looking forward to watching this baby blog grow.

LP advertising revenue and donation accountability post

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days 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’

Back to square one

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 5 days ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Media, Notices and Sydney
. 0 Comments

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.

Wordpress.com enables another new “feature” to far from universal acclaim - PSA

Published
by
tigtog
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Asshattery, Blogging, Ethics, Media and The Web
. 33 Comments

This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com.

Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)

This new feature generates a list of “Possibly Related Posts” at the foot of your own posts, and it searches through a database of all other Wordpress.com blogs to do so. Now, just consider the variety of attitudes people have to the words “feminism” and “racism” for instance, and can you guess where this is going? Oh yes it did - the list of “possibly related posts” on Fire Fly’s feminist blog included links to posts written by white supremacists and anti-feminists (often in the same link) - fanfuckingtastic, eh? So your readers might well think that these posts are being recommended by you, instead of automatically, and what does that do to a poster’s credibility? …. » Problem No.2

Did I mention that these “possibly related post” links are not visible or able to be edited when you are writing your post? … » Problem No.3

Not only that, by having this feature enabled on your blog, it also means that posts from your blog are being included in the list generated by this “feature” on other people’s blogs, which for Fire Fly included those self-same white supremacists and anti-feminists, thus sending their readers to her blog. This is why she titled her post thusly: Warning! The new WordPress feature is utter trollbait. … » Problem No.4

I was very grateful for her post, because it enabled me to immediately disable this “feature” Continue reading ‘Wordpress.com enables another new “feature” to far from universal acclaim - PSA’

2020 summit commentary

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Blogging and Media
. 16 Comments

Club Troppo’s Missing Link has a good round up of blogospheric commentary on the 2020 summit, and Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy links to some posts as well as commentary in the MSM.

The interim report of the summit is online here.

Update: More from Andrew Bartlett, Andrew Norton, Lauredhel, Derek Barry, Gary Sauer-Thompson, gatewatching, tigtog and John Quiggin. Bartlett also has a large number of links in his post with summaries.

Further update: More posts from Graham Young, Andrew Leigh and Jacques Chester, and a plethora of commentary at New Matilda, where there are articles on “The Long View”, the governance stream, and climate change.

Stuart Cunningham writes about the digital agenda, and at PollieGraph, Ben Eltham has an initial look at the Creative Australia stream, about which I’ll also be having something to say in due course.

And there’s more: A new links post from Andrew Bartlett. The post will be updated with more links over the next few days as they come in. Andrew Leigh republishes his op/ed from today’s Fin Review at his blog.

Cross-posted at PollieGraph.

2020 summit mediated

Published
by
Mark
4 weeks ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Blogging and Media
. 97 Comments

I’m kinda hoping a photo of the speed dating economists holding ideas above their heads and waiting for others to coalesce surfaces somewhere. Doesn’t sound to me like a real marketplace - shouldn’t they have worked out some way to trade the ideas, and run a betting market on the prospects?

The summit wrap up at the SMH, though, does feature the Prime Minister in informal mode at the economics stream.

There’s precious little commentary to be found around the blogosphere (the independent blogosphere, that is, Andrew Bolt’s been having a field day. He’s threatening to emigrate). From The Age, Michelle Grattan and Ray Cassin comment, and there’s a quick summary of what each stream has come up with so far. At the SMH, Cate Blanchett gets upstaged by celebrity baby, Iggy, and Annabel Crabb tries her hand at liveblogging (continuing on in comments). At the Oz, George Megalogenis thinks that it’s a “show about nothing” and has a jaundiced take on Kevin Rudd’s agenda - symbolism before substance, he reckons. Rudd’s opening speech, by the way, can be found in full online here.

Continue reading ‘2020 summit mediated’

Thanks

Published
by
Darlene
1 month ago
in Blogging and Melbourne
. Closed

There will be more photos and videos to follow, but I just want to say thanks to the people who came to the forum last night. Your interest in the topic was fabulous and thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. It was lovely to get the chance to meet all of you. You deserve a round of applause.

lp2.jpg

A photo of the forum’s speakers (Professor Chris Nash is wearing a red shirt, Matthew Ricketson from The Age is standing behind Jane Nethercote from Crikey. Jane’s attired in the striped dress). Also featured are some of the people who attended.

Media watch, independent media edition

Published
by
Kim
1 month ago
in Blogging and Media
. 5 Comments

Crikey has been making the running on the big story of the escalating conflict between Age journalists and their editor Andrew Jaspan over the increasing pressures to conform reporting to the paper’s manifold commercial “partnerships”. Fairfax management have now apparently taken the side of Jaspan, despite repeated speculation that his tenure was shaky, and effectively junked all the fine words in the charter of independence wrested from the company in a bitter fight after the disastrous attempt to privatise the group by Warwick Fairfax in 1988. Blogger of record on these sorts of things, Derek Barry, has a very comprehensive round up of the story at Woolly Days.