Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Now this is what I call a netroots base

Published
by
tigtog
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Blogging, Foreign Elections, Media, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 4 Comments

Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner

Sean Tevis’ innovative method of raising internet funds in his venture to oust and replace his current State Representative (basically equivalent to one of our State MPs?) in Kansas is an online comic strip.

When Sean Tevis decided to run for a seat in the Kansas Legislature, he faced a serious problem: money. Local political advisors warned the campaign novice that he would need a war chest of at least $26,000 to compete against his entrenched Republican rival.

Having calculated that if he could get 3000 people to donate $8.34 each, he would reach that target, he created the comic strip to garner attention from potential online donors. He’s sort of a one-man Get Up! campaign.

Apparently, no other candidate for State Representative in Kansas has ever had more than 644 donors, so there was a built-in news narrative if he could make it work. So did it? Well, there’s a bunch of news coverage online, as well as many bloggings.

How many similar efforts are we going to see in election contests in the immediate future, do you think?

H/T to one of my Best Mates on a mailing list (and crossposted on Hoyden About Town)

Howard’s End: not E. M. Forster but Van Onselen and Senior

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Advertising, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Federal Elections, Howardia and Media
. 27 Comments

Here’s another don’t waste your $34.95 book review, and for many of the same reasons as Mark identified as failures in an earlier 2007 federal election tome from Melbourne University Press - Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07.

If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.

The blurb claims:

In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.

Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.

If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.

But it gets worse. Continue reading ‘Howard’s End: not E. M. Forster but Van Onselen and Senior’

Blogging political fiction

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing and Film, TV, Video etc
. 34 Comments

One of the rather egregious questions on last week’s Q&A asked the panel to comment on why there was no contemporary political fiction of the stature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s. As with a lot of the queries posed on Q&A, it’s a bit of a silly one, but it did remind me that we discussed political fiction here at LP a while back, and to give folks the heads up that American speculative fiction writer and anthologist Jeff VanderMeer is blogging about political fiction at The Huffington Post.

[VanderMeer, along with regular guest bloggers, writes regularly at Ecstatic Days.]

Barry Brook blogs, talks, and podcasts…

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Climate change and Environment
. 4 Comments

Professor Barry Brook’s research involves bringing the power of statistical modeling to ecological issues, most notably the effects of climate change on the environment. So it’s great to discover that he’s now blogging about it at bravenewclimate.com, where he already has some fascinating posts up.

One particularly interesting, and provocative post, is on the topic of methane emissions, linking to an Age op-ed he coauthored on it. Essentially, he argues that the Garnaut Report grossly underestimates the effects of methane emissions (which only persist in the atmosphere for a couple of decades) by averaging them over a century.

Brook has also organized a six-part seminar series on climate change - he’s already put the slides and the audio up from the first . If you’re in Adelaide you might be interested to get along to the remaining seminars, or, for the rest of us, downloading the podcasts.

In any case, it’s great to welcome somebody with Professor Brook’s expertise to the Australian blogosphere. I’ll certainly be reading regularly.

Who’s hollow?

Published
by
Phil
2 months ago
in Blogging and Media
. 10 Comments

An interesting commentary in the bloggers vs MSM (press gallery) argument via The Hollowmen.

Ian: I thought he did rather well.

Tony: Tie worked well as well, bowled, front foot.

Ian: Yeah, a few prickly questions.

Tony: Yeah, bloggers.

Interesting that the view here is of bloggers being prickly; meaning what? Asking the tough questions that the MSN (gallery) won’t? Are there any non MSM ‘real’ or independent bloggers at the PM’s doorstop pressers in Canberra around to be prickly?

Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life

Published
by
Mark
2 months ago
in Blogging, Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Life, Media, Music, Parenting, Relationships, Sociology, Technology and The Web
. 11 Comments

In doing a bit of reading for a couple of courses I’m teaching this semester, I was struck recently by the concision with which Mark Deuze pings how mediated so many aspects of our everyday lives now are - and how he deftly places this constant mediation - through email, mobile phones, the intertubes, and so much more - in its sociological context, leveraging off the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Some day, when I have time, I’ll have more to say about that, and there’s lots of nifty academic research - a fair bit from my colleagues at QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty - which is exploring many of the ramifications of everyday mediation. Loath as I normally am as a sociologist to believe the new new anything really is fundamentally new under the sun, I am starting to be convinced that a shift in the conditions of our everyday lives is taking place, though I’m totally unconvinced by claims that it’s “dumbing us down” or whatever.

Continue reading ‘Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life’