gatewatching

Update: For those prepared to contemplate the erotic allure of blogspot profile photos in relation to the Henson debate, the NSFW (language) Grodsthink for this week should provide some food for thought.
This week, in the tissues and the blogosphere, there has been a lot of discussion of art, and its “evil twin” pornography, in [...]

One of the biggest annual events in our disciplinary area is the International Communications Association conference.
Our colleague Terry Flew is there, and judging by his activity on his blog over the last few days, he’s going to be filling us in on what we’re missing. He’s already railed against the fast and loose use of [...]

Alcopops, petrol tax holidays, who leaked emails from whom… Sometimes its difficult to get serious policy discussion in the MSM (unless, like me, you’re a Fin junkie).
The best way to find out about major policy developments that impact on your areas of concern is through your RSS reader. I thought I’d try to start sharing [...]

It’s good to get offline for a while now and then. Last night I went to the Belgian Beer Cafe in Brisbane with some colleagues and friends. The mussels were lovely (as was the beer), but as well as getting some nourishment and giving my eyes a rest I got to hear about an interesting [...]

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)
The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I’ve also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In [...]

Courtesy of Club Troppo’s always excellent Missing Link, I was led to read Lyn Calcutt’s view on the climate change blow-up of the last few days. Interestingly, it relates pretty well to the previous two posts on Gatewatching.  She thinks the latest GW spat is pretty unedifying, and writes:
Compare these brawls among a few high [...]

Before, during and after the last Federal Election, psephological bloggers put MSM noses out of joint. They also demonstrated the value of alternative online sources of political information to a lot of people for the first time. Although some blogs like Poll Bludger, Possum’s Pollytics, Simon Jackman and Mumble had actually been around for [...]

UPDATE: I missed Tim Lambert’s contribution to the Quiggin/Young bout.
First in a new series offering links to fresh and robust stoushing. I’ll try a longer post about snark and stoushing later this week!
BANG!!!
John Quiggin replies to Graham Young’s On Line Opinion piece on warming “bullying” with an invocation of Godwin’s law. (Look down the [...]

Graham Young has started releasing a polling series measuring the impact of the Rudd Government’s first budget. Graham is On Line Opinion’s founder and chief, and our colleague in the ARC citizen journalism project. But he’s also been pioneering the use of online qualitative polling over an extended period, and lately he’s been testing new [...]

Andrew Norton has written about the Australia Election Survey’s findings about who reads political blogs.
It’s the raw numbers that make you stop and think. Although the proportion of the sample who had read a political blog doubled between 2004 and 2007, that still only amounted to 2.7% of the sample. To put that in perspective, [...]