gatewatching

Our 8th Club Bloggery is up at the ABC site. We’ve got some recommendations for voters based on the parties online performance. Have a look.

This will be our last Club Bloggery for the election, but keep an eye out for more pieces from the gatewatching crew.

Club Bloggery part 8: Scoring the e-lection

Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Axel Bruns.

This close to the election, it’s customary for newspapers to recommend a vote one way or the other. We’re not about to do that at Club Bloggery (although we would recommend thinking about the candidate who’s been more responsive and available to your community), but we can do a summary of who has made the best running on the Internet, and understood and used its possibilities best.
Read more…

blogging, government blogging, government, journalism

We’ve now posted the seventh instalment of our ABC series Club Bloggery, covering the online dimensions of the Australian election campaign. Just to mix things up a bit, this week we had a look at what’s been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks, and found that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more interesting developments are in DIY campaign advertising and mash-ups. Plenty of links included in the story below - we encourage you to see for yourselves!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In an election campaign as drawn out as this, you’d have to have excellent memory to remember the hype around John Howard’s use of YouTube to make policy announcements. Some months ago, the media were all over the story - but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much like the widely-predicted poll ‘narrowing‘, the YouTube effect has been missing in action.

That’s not to say that YouTube and similar sites haven’t played a role in the campaign - but certainly not to the extent they’ve already featured in the U.S. presidential primaries, where debates between the candidates on either side of the political divide have invited citizens to pose their questions via YouTube, and where some politicians even announced their intention to run for President on the site.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism, media blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, media

Hi all - here’s the latest Club Bloggery posted over at the ABC on Friday. The topic seems to have excited a fair amount of interest - feel free to comment here.

Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, and Barry Saunders

Collectively, the writers here at Club Bloggery have been watching the Australian political blogosphere for years. We know that the bloggers who have perhaps been most important and prominent down under are psephologists – specialist electoral statisticians who try to understand and analyse polls, and consider the interlocking numbers games of electoral politics.

Head counters like the anonymous Possum Comitatus, Simon Jackman, William Bowe, and Peter Brent produce accessible, incisive, original takes on polling, and engage in prolonged discussion with their readers about the meaning and import of their analysis. Week after week, free of charge, they offer in-depth analysis on polling that improves our understanding of the political process and of how party strategists think. That’s why we were surprised this week when a journalist in The Australian, Samantha Maiden, attacked a few psephs by name, implying that their sites amounted to little more than left-wing wish-fulfilment.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism, government, media blogging, citizen journalism, government, journalism, media

The latest Club Bloggery is up on the ABC. Here’s is the longer version.

By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns

Climate change dominated a couple of days of Federal Election campaigning earlier this week, with the major parties both fumbling in laying out their responses. Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull were punished by the mainstream media for, respectively, revealing something approximating a real opinion about how climate change agreements should work, and for being involved in a debate about Government policy before it’s implemented.

Australia’s bloggers have been more nuanced in their coverage of environmental challenges over a much longer period, and unlike the mainstream media, they have been able to carry out analyses and host conversations that reveal the range of community opinions on what kind of shape our environment is in, and what we can or ought to do to remedy it.
Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism, government blogging, citizen journalism, climate change, environment, government, journalism