gatewatching

Good news! Our University has purchased a site license for Leximancer, and we’ll be making extensive use of it in our research on the Australian blogosphere.

The blurb from the website gives a pretty neat summary of what Leximancer does:

Leximancer is a software tool that enables users to find meaning from text-based documents. It automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas from unstructured text with little or no guidance. The innovative concept map allows users to interact with the analysis – navigating the true meaning of the text.

Of course, there are other ways to find “meaning” in text, but the application for it in studying the blogosphere is in finding out whether particular bloggers have concepts or themes that they return to over time, and whether that’s matched by the comments threads.

I imagine bloggers themselves might be interested in seeing the results of this kind of analysis of their blogs - we might issue a call for dump files soon when we’re more expert users.

Leximancer itself is an interesting example of research commercialisation - it began its life over at UQ as applied IT research, and now its a commercial venture.

Anyway, its bound to be a fun toy to play with - the first thing we’ll do is analyse our own project, youdecide2007, to see which concepts and themes recur most frequently.

Leximancer, blogging, research, youdecide2007

Jeff Jarvis smacks down the American media’s love for (and lack of skill at) horse race politics:

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it…
Any idiot can bet on a horse and lose. And there’s a word for them. Losers.

While we’ve also been quite critical here about the Australian election coverage and its horse-race narratives, we’re very lucky to have an electoral system that is open to good psephological analysis. As Simon Jackman points out in addressing the lack of an American Antony Green:

The United States doesn’t have an Antony Green. I’m not sure it can. It doesn’t have the ABC (the national broadcaster), it doesn’t have the AEC, nor compulsory voting, nor standardized, nationwide election administration (balloting procedures, registration procedures, etc).

Read more…

abc, blogging, citizen journalism, elections, investigative, journalism, poll wars, psephology

One of the most consistently… bracing political blogs is Andrew Elder’s clearing-house for the foibles of the commentariat, Politically Homeless.

I haven’t had time to have a good solid read of his stuff for a while - a comment from The Doctor on a previous Gatewatching post led me to have a squiz this evening.

His stuff is critical and often hilarious, but it’s beyond snark - Elder’s style involves a close, often line-by-line disassembly of the offerings of the paid-up commentariat, and discussions of their shortcomings that are extended, impassioned and incisive. Usually each post focusses on a single article.

I couldn’t just add a link to the poll wars post of earlier this week, which catalogued the brouhaha on the 21st - I thought passages like this deserved a post of their own:

Dennis Shanahan is an experienced journalist, yet his experience was sidelined by
his yearning for more Howard. He was comprehensively shown up by people going
by names like Possum Comitatus, Poll Bludger and Mumble. People smarter than him,
people who knew more about voting patterns than he did, people who all but stole
the bread and butter out of his mouth.

That’s about the least combative part of that post, by the way.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve all got his feed in your readers already. If you haven’t, and you’d like to see how excoriating intelligent, informed blogospheric voices can be, get over there.

UPDATE THURSDAY: Yesterday’s post about the “renaissance” of moderate Liberalism, which bounces off an article written by Liberal MP Marise Payne, is simply a classic of Elder’s idiosyncratic style.

The Australian, blogging, journalism, media, poll wars

John Birmingham isn’t the first, and won’t be the last blogger to try to take the heat out of the discussions that take place on his threads. I do like the way he does it, though, today on his Brisbane Times blog. He says that contempt is…

…poison in any kind of relationship, and in the end that’s what a blog is. A developing relationship, not just between the writer and his or her correspondents, but between the correspondents themselves. A flourishing blog becomes a small village or even a town, and like any human society it also becomes complicated in very short order… Yes, I am responsible for the tone of the header and when I’m writing about certain issues that will be harsh… But as to whether Brisbanetimes doesn’t pay me enough to run a civil discussion, I’d simply remind you that you’re all grown ups, and I don’t ‘run’ anything. The discussion is yours, not mine.

Sometimes the participants in these conversations turn up on across a number of blogs, but the village metaphor lights on the fact that each blog, and sometimes even each thread, has its own character, and what that character is is as much up to the community as it is to blog authors.

blogging

Among the consequences of the emergence of the opinion-led blogosphere are, on the one hand, news organisations bringing prominent bloggers “inside the tent”, and on the other, presenting their op-ed writers work in a “blog-like” format. Whether you think that’s just due recognition of the affordances of blogging and the ’sphere’s emerging talent, or lip service and the co-optation of alternative voices will depend on what you think blogging is for.

What’s interesting to me is that, in turn, this allows differences of opinion within media organisations to emerge pretty well instantaneously. Today, for instance, Blogocracy’s Tim Dunlop has done a long post about his disagreeement with the underlying logic of a column by Malcolm Colless, published in this morning’s Australian.

Read more…

Bolt, Dunlop, The Australian, blogging, journalism, media, news.com.au, poll wars, psephology

Well, maybe not ever ever, but as a Queenslander it’s hard not to think that tonight’s edition was important for revisiting a turning-point in our State’s history. Four premiers were interviewed, and there was some overdue credit for unlikely heroes like Mike Ahern, who realised the State needed to change, and made it happen at personal and political cost.

One of the big criticisms that the blogosphere (right across the political spectrum) makes of the mainstream media is that it’s abandoned its “Fourth Estate” role, and is too far integrated with the PR industry and the machinery of government.

This show was a nice reprise by Chris Masters of his own classic investigative work in programmes like “The Moonlight State”, which saw investigative journalism lead directly to bringing down a corrupt government. The economics of the contemporary commercial media make this kind of blockbusting investigative work more difficult to carry out, and for now the blogosphere is not really equipped to do it either, except perhaps on a hyperlocal level (have I plugged Cairnsblog and Strewth today?)

This is something that we need to address as a society - and I think that’s what we were trying to pick up on in our latest ABC column. Meanwhile, ask a Queenslander what happens when media, business and the machinery of government get too cosy.

Link to the video of the show here.

Queensland, abc, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, law

Our latest piece is up at the ABC here Feel free to comment there or here.

Club Bloggery: Once were barons
By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

The Bulletin magazine, published by ACP, has closed down after almost 130 years of publishing.

Though we often give the print media a hard time here at Club Bloggery, we’re not so sanguine about the end of the iconic magazine, The Bulletin, last month. Despite its virulently racist origins, and its tendency under Kerry Packer to be used now and then as the mogul’s mouthpiece, its end is an alarming symptom of something wider and more serious. The worrying structural problem it reveals is the difficulty of sustaining any venues for the specialised task of investigative journalism in Australian and international media. Read more…

abc, academic, blogging, bulletin, business, government, investigative, journalism

In the Outsiders post earlier today, I mentioned that Possum said he was bringing his regular service back online after a short break in the real world. He has delivered immediately with a reply to The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan’s criticism of the psephosphere last week.

Read Shanahan’s column first, then proceed directly to Possum’s post.

We’ve written about last year’s poll wars here, in our ABC column and in some academic publications before. They’ve been ignited again, and once more it seems to be the Oz that’s buying the fight. To repeat our earlier arguments - this is a struggle over cultural capital, and the authority to interpret political information, but it may well turn out to be counter-productive for Shanahan. Possum’s reasoning in this latest reply seems compelling, but the fact that bloggers can actually bring expert knowledge to these topics might well be the very thing that inspires broadsheet snark.

We’ll watch this unfold with interest.

UPDATE: Let the record show that William Bowe at Poll Bludger and Peter Brent at Mumble responded to the Shanahan on the 21st. We would have got to this earlier but we were busy last week

blogging, journalism, media, poll wars, psephology

This is the first go at a regular feature I’ll try on the blog where, every Sunday, we’ll bypass the gallery ‘insiders’ and set out the political blogosphere’s prospective agenda for the week with some selected links.

Council elections: The rest of the country might be having a little break from elections for a while, but here in the Sunshine State we have to elect our local councils in a couple of weeks. You’ll remember that one of John Howard’s unsuccessful late “wedges” was trying to turn amalgamations into an issue for Kevin Rudd by offering plebiscites, and attacking Peter Beattie as a Rudd proxy. The update is that people are voting in some brand new Local Government areas, and in the resultant game of musical chairs, some long-serving councillors are bound to miss out. The blogosphere up here is doing a great job of covering it.

Indeed, few things have pleased me more in recent weeks than finding out about hyperlocal bloggers in regional Queensland like Cairnsblog (covering Cairns and surrounds) and Strewth! (Covering Hervey Bay and the Fraser Coast). These are providing alternative news sources in some areas that are under-serviced by the mainstream media. They’re both also in the best tabloid traditions of pugnacious, colourful muckraking. Go, now, and add them to your RSS subscriptions. This is what I’d hope that one possible future direction for the political blogosphere could look like.

Read more…

Outsiders, Queensland, blogging, elections, gaming, journalism, law, media

A few bloggy responses to the first 100 days of the new government. (If there are some we’ve missed, let us know)

Guy Beres offers a summary of the MSM reaction.

Tim Dunlop reckons that the printed report is a bit rich after the pasting Labor have been giving the outgoing government over political advertising.

And Uncle Piers, well…

AFTER just 99 days of the Rudd government, Australia is in the worst political position it has endured since the crisis days of the Whitlam government 33 years ago.

Here’s hoping he’s on Insiders tomorrow, and that this is just an appetiser.

UPDATE: Yes and yes.

advertising, blogging, government, media