Tropposphere
A little while back, during the AMIC Conference, I was at an after-dinner presentation by a honcho from Fairfax Online. I asked whether they write news with RSS Readers in mind. She said that folk who take their news through RSS Feeds are pretty well an elite minority in Australia, and they’re not really taken into account by the big online players when they’re presenting content. It may sound odd to those of us who use them habitually, but most people get by quite happily by simply going directly to their favourite sites for news, Googling topics of interest, or relying on forms of aggregation that don’t involve RSS - like lists of links on trusted sites.
Perhaps Ken Parish has had the same inkling. Over on Club Troppo he’s unveiled the Tropposphere, which is, as he puts it, a “‘hard-wired’ online feed reader’ hosted by Troppo. It’s their selection of the best of the Australian blogosphere, and I guess it’s intended to augment their daily “Missing Link” compilations, which range around more broadly.
It’s a good initiative, particularly for those who don’t use feeds. Beyond that, it visualises one version of community in the Australian blogosphere (obviously, as in any selection, there’s a lot that’s excluded, but Ken explains the principles by which blogs have been chosen quite clearly).
Nice work Ken and the Troppo crew.
(PS - As impressed as I am, I had to ask a cheeky question in the comment thread. Given the stick we got from Troppo over making “left-right” distinctions in the blogosphere in our own research, I had to know how Ken had arrived at his own categories of “left-leaning”, “right-leaning” and “centrist” in the feeds. Sensibly, he seems to have ignored this remark.)
UPDATE: Troppo’s principles of selection for the ’sphere have not met with Lauredhel’s approval. The suggestion is that there is a significant underrepresentation of women on the Tropposphere aggregator. I think there might be some women in there on co-authored blogs (e.g. LP and VOTAY) but it could be a fair point.
Of the blogs where I could clearly identify a “head” or “co-head”, and where the likely gender of the head was identifiable, I’m getting a ratio approaching ten to one. Whee, summit chair nostalgia! This is after excluding the big commercial news sites, which are of course overwhelmingly blokey. Numbers are not precise, and I may have misidentified here and there, though that’s not going to change the overall impression much if at all.
Women are concentrated in the Arts (though they don’t predominate) and in Law (I’m not sure if that’s skepticlawyer’s influence), and are virtually absent in the political/economic selections. In politics, there are the women sidekicks at male-headed LP, and three blogs where I couldn’t identify the gender, but otherwise it’s blokes all the way down. Even in the international political blogs, blogs like Shakesville and HuffPo were overlooked.
This is what the Troppo folk find “interesting” and “notable”. I’m not going to mount some sort of protest about it - such judgements are, obviously, subjective, the Troppodilians have a perfect right to immerse themselves in Fresh Manly Wisdom, and the subjectivity of their criteria is declared up front - but there’s no denying it’s a glaring imbalance.