gatewatching

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 [...]

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, [...]

In his recent post on mainstream newspapers’ gradual warming to Google as a source of traffic to their Websites, Jason points to Matthew Hindman’s claims that descriptions of the Net as ‘democratising’ media participation may be overstated (in Hindman’s book manuscript Voice, Equality, and the Internet), and notes my skeptical stance towards Hindman’s conclusions. Heh. [...]

New post on the ABC’s Opinion Page is cross-posted over the fold. There’s some other great stuff there today, including a piece on a useful possible running-mate for Barry O’Bama

Andrew Landeryou responds this morning to a bizarre intervention by Neil Mitchell in the blog-gate affair, where he suggests that the Liberal bloggers should be prosecuted for “cyber-bullying”.
It leads Landeryou to offer a colourful call to arms, where he suggests that the activities of  Australia’s blogosphere point towards a potential “golden age of political journalism”. [...]

One of the topics that consistently exercises the Australian blogosphere is global warming. What’s at issue, of course, is whether or not human, industrial activity is contributing to an increase in global temperatures, and possible environmental catastrophe.
There is an orthodox scientific view on this, as expressed in documents like the IPCC Report, the Stern Report, [...]

The discussion about the influence of Australian political bloggers on wider political processes which was kicked off by Jason’s recent posts on Tim Blair’s move to the Daily Telegraph and Christian Kerr’s summary dismissal of Ozblogistan’s political combattants in The Australian has prompted me to finally post up some more information about the research we’re [...]

UPDATE: Lyn Calcutt over on Public Opinion takes up this theme, is much harder on CK than us, but makes some fair points along the way.
UPDATE 2: One of those points being, of course, that it was a blogger who broke the story in the first place.
UPDATE 3: Tree of Knowledge is onto this [...]

UPDATE: Grodscorp’s weekly podcast, this time including discussion of the Blair move, is here. NSFW - frequent coarse language.

I think it’s fair to say that we here at Gatewatching have had an… interesting relationship with Tim Blair’s blog since we started posting here last year. I won’t go over the details of our spat - [...]

I’m sure many of you have Andrew Landeryou’s “The Other Cheek” in your RSS readers. Those who do will have seen that over this weekend he’s been revealing a story about the Victorian Liberals that he’s calling “blog-gate“. The Sunday Age also wrote this story up today.
Two Liberal staffers, it seems, have been anonymously authoring [...]