gatewatching

Today’s Crikey carries a story about the NAB (or rather a PR firm representing them, Cox&Inall) spamming Australian blogs with promotional comments. Rather than impotence treatments or naughty pictures, this spam (posted on sports blogs) was inviting blog readers to enter a promotion being run for the bank. The story is behind the Crikey paywall, but I reprint here a part of the story where they questioned someone from the PR agency about the strategy:

Cox+Inall had searched for blogs that included AFL coverage and were “well-enough read to attract readers who might be interested in our offer,” said Ms Glennie-Holmes. No-one at NAB or at Cox+Inall had considered approaching blog owners first for permission before posting their promotional messages, she said.

“Blogs are a public forum”, said Ms Glennie-Holmes. NAB and Cox+Inall felt this meant commercial interests could feel free to contribute unsolicited and irrelevant commercial material as comments, placing the onus on blog moderators to reject or delete unwanted comments.

“We identified five or six blogs where we felt we’d give it a try,” explained Ms Glennie-Holmes. “We chose blogs where we thought the moderators would review and decide whether or not to carry our message…it was up to the blogger to decide whether they would leave the comment there or delete it.”

I really don’t think that this is a good way forward for big business to engage with the blogosphere. Indeed, it betrays a pretty serious misjudgement on the part of Cox+Inall and their client’s about the nature of blogging and its rules of engagement. Claiming that blogs are a public forum is a major simplification of the relationship between bloggers, their regular readers and commenters and the wider world. It’s also disingenuous - they were really looking to get some free advertising at bloggers’ expense.

At minimum, some sort of consultation with the blogs’ authors/moderators in getting their promotion to their audience is in order when third-party commerical organisations want access to blogs. But of course, given the objections of some readers when bloggers decide to take ads, the need to tread carefully doesn’t end with having a word with the author.

NAB seems to have managed only to alienate the sympathies of people whose audience they clearly wish to reach. It seems that PR firms still have a lot to learn about the blogosphere’s ground-rules.

Crikey, NAB, blogging, blogosphere

Along with his fellow pseph bloggers, Possum Comitatus made a big splash during the Federal Election campaign, and he now has a loyal, politically literate readership. Now he’s giving some more back to the Australian blogosphere.

On the weekend, he launched a companion site for his blog, the Possum Box, that he’s thrown open as a forum for anyone who’d like to make a start in political blogging. He explains it in the about section of the new blog:

The Possum Box is a spin off from the Possums Pollytics site , providing a means for both occasional political writers and new political bloggers to have their work exposed to a larger audience.

While the internet is often described as having removed the barriers to entry in the broad media space, the obscurity faced by new bloggers and occasional writers is the biggest impediment to a new media landscape where quality can be allowed to speak for itself.

This project attempts to assist in exposing new political writers to a larger audience with the hope of facilitating the underlying meritocratic powers of the internet - letting good stuff rise to the top, relatively quickly, even if only in its own niche area.

From my own experience of becoming an accidental blogger in 2007, readership grows from the charitable actions of larger established blogs in picking up the work of new people and exposing them to a larger audience. After being the beneficiary of such exposure by others and becoming an established high traffic blog in my own right, it’s only fair that I now do the same for new writers in the Australian political blogosphere - perhaps even encouraging the development of a valuable tradition in the process.

Great move, and nice to see someone recognising the lonely, difficult time people have when they’re starting out. The whole initiative is also incredibly refreshing in a space that so often seems consumed by the unlovely imperative to self-promotion. Good luck, Poss, and readers should get over to the site and see if they’d like to support it with their own pearls of wisdom. (There are two great posts there already).

(PS - My only concern is that “The Possum Box” sounds like another name for that place where one’s significant other sends one after a bout of bad behaviour - i.e. the “doghouse”. Never mind.)

Possum Comitatus, The Possum Box, blogging, blogosphere, open publishing, psephology

In this second part, we’ll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I’ve already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008. We distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages, and what I’m focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we’ve separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.).

What I’ve done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs. In the first part of this post, I simply listed the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they’re frequently talking about), which produced some notable differences between the three blogs. My reading of this is that Club Troppo focusses much more strongly on policy analysis over political wonkery and insider gossip; for The Other Cheek, the balance is reversed, while Larvatus Prodeo sits somewhere in the middle.

In this second part, I’ll map these blogs’ key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another on the map than terms which don’t, in other words. The resulting maps provide further support to the observation that the blogs have different points of focus in their day-to-day coverage of politics - and by plotting all frequently-used terms on the map, the exact nature of these topical clusters becomes a little clearer, too.

Read more…

academic, blogging

I use a MacBook and everything, and I wouldn’t go back to PCs, but sometimes I find Apple-devotion a little creepy. Everyone knows they’re a multinational corporation that’s basically a lot like Bill’s mob, right? (Even though I use them, I always laugh at this Charlie Brooker takedown).

Anyway I laughed at GrodsCorp’s post today, which pricks the iPhone 2.0 hysteria a little bit by pointing out that while he was launching the machine, Steve Jobs’ pants were definitely Jeans 1.0

Apple, Grods

In a previous post, I mentioned our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008, and we’ve now begun an exploratory analysis of this corpus of data.

As noted in our discussion paper for this project, the first step in this analysis is to distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages (something that does not necessarily happen in comparable studies, by the way). So, what I’m focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we’ve separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.). While I’ll mainly discuss content analysis here, this is especially important also in the context of link analysis, of course, where blogroll, comment, and other links skew the data if we want to focus on examining the discursive network between blog posts.

So, building on this corpus of blog post data, here are some preliminary observations. What I’ve done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs, to both fine-tune that process and see if any discernible differences between individual blogs emerge. I’ll present the results in two ways: one simply lists the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they’re frequently talking about), and the second maps these key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another than terms which don’t, in other words. (I’ll post these maps later, in the second part of this post.)

Read more…

academic, blogging

UPDATE: Download of today’s broadcast on citizen journalism available here. Well worth a listen.

Aussie readers should tune in at 6PM to ABC Radio National for Australia Talks this evening. It’s about citizen journalism.

Preview from the RN’s Australia Talks website:

abc, citizen journalism

Because we’re always keen to support other researchers, I’m re-posting this call out for research participants from an Honours student down the road at UQ. It looks like a research project on the relationship between bloggers and their readership - interesting stuff. Put the word out if possible.

Do you have a favourite blogger that you want to talk about?

I am an Honours student from the University of Queensland, Australia and I am conducting an email-based survey that looks at the experiences that blog readers have with their favourite bloggers.

To take part in this research you cannot be a blogger yourself and you cannot know the blogger offline.

For ethical and legal issues you MUST be 18+ years of age and an Australian Citizen to partake in this research.

If this sounds like you and you would like to participate in this original and exciting research project then please email Bo at:

s4029966[AT]student.uq.edu.au

Participation is until August 2008.

All inquiries are very much appreciated!

Via Home Cooked Theory.

Home Cooked Theory, UQ, academia, blogging, research

Thanks to a heads-up from Tim at Tree of Knowledge, I found out about this conference, the Personal democracy Forum, being held in New York City this month. Looks like they’ll be discussing some issues that have preoccupied us here at Gatewatching - the influence of new technologies on political campaigning and debate.

The debate in this area doesn’t just happen on Gatewatching The conference’s tagline is “technology is changing politics”, but Charlie Beckett (who heads up the LSE’s Polis Centre where Tim is studying) has posed the following tough questions that he’d like the conference to answer:

1. Tell me in concrete terms what the new technology has allowed you to do that is significantly different in political terms from before? Not just being faster, more connected, more responsive. Tell me what difference it has made, if any, in policy outcomes and the distribution of power?

2. Is this just an American thing? Is it because US politics was so sterile, so locked up by lobbyists and big money and ideological stasis? or can new technology unleash new democratic forces in other countries?

I’d add another - could you make a realistic comparison of the current impacts of online campaigning methods and traditional broadcast media? One of the big speakers at the conference, Clay Shirky, has said some pretty silly things lately about the place of television in our culture - I would hope that the conference would proceed with a recognition that broadcast media are still the principal information source for most voters. That’s not being cynical, just conceding that there is a long way to go, and lots of work to do, in making online engagement more generally available and effective.

Sadly I won’t be able to go - I’ll be preparing for something new (more on that later), but Tim says he’ll be liveblogging the conference (presumably over at TOK), so that’s something to look forward to.

Charlie Beckett, Clay Shirky, Tree of Knowledge, USA, conferences, democracy, e-democracy, elections

It’s probably going to be everywhere soon, but I just thought I’d link to what Daily Kos claims is the leaked text of Barry O’Bama’s victory speech claiming the Democratic Party’s nomination for the US Presidency. Whichever way you look at it, this is an historic moment.

Barack Obama, USA

Yesterday, Possum did a piece for Crikey (reproduced on his blog) which was a great take-down of some MSM reporting of some pretty inconsequential movements in the Newspoll numbers. Poss reckons the Oz (especially the Shanahany bits) is back to their old tricks - spinning, shifting the goalposts, and generally trying to make things look worse than they are for the PM.

If you’d rather rely on qualitative polling than the hunches of Dennis to get an insight into what people thought about the budget a little while back, check out Graham Young’s write-up of his What the People Want polling series in On Line Opinion this morning.

The summary? “Overall the budget didn’t evoke strong emotions and was incremental rather than revolutionary.” Kevin Rudd consolidated things, and although Graham’s survey didn’t include the fuelwatch fracas, it’s likely that the long-term effect of the last week or two will be closer to the findings of his polling than the guesses/spin on the meaning of quantitaive polling by gallery journos.

Dennis Shanahan, Graham Young, Possum Comitatus, The Australian, What the People Want, budget, poll wars, polling