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.

blogging blogging, blogosphere, Crikey, NAB

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.)

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

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…

blogging academic, blogging

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.)

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blogging academic, blogging

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.

blogging academia, blogging, Home Cooked Theory, research, UQ

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 some of what I get on a semi-regular basis on the blog. We’ve posted about policy matters before, but at the moment there is important stuff coming out pretty well every week that has a direct bearing on citizen journalism and politics online. I thought I might as well stick it all together for readers now and again.

With all the reviews and inquiries going on just now, there will be a mass of reporting coming along shortly which will be informing big policy initiatives. Also, notwithstanding some MSM narratives of the first six months, I’m with Mark Bahnisch and Possum in holding that there is actually a fair bit going on already - you just have to look around in a clear-eyed fashion. There are some fundamental policy shifts slowly being put in place, particularly in the communications area, but for whatever reason it’s not being picked up on by the big outlets. I guess that’s one area where bloggers come into their own.

Read more…

ACMA, Steven Conroy, Telstra, blogging, broadband, media literacy, regulation ACMA, blogging, broadband, futures, infrastructure, media literacy, policy, regulation, Steven Conroy, Telstra

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 local campaign: Save Our Kenmore!

The reason SOK is of interest here is that they’re using blogs and social networking to coordinate protest about a controversial freeway development in Brisbane’s west. Some background: the plan being protested is part of the (ahem) “Moggill Pocket Sub-Arterial”, known as the Kenmore bypass, but its most controversial element might be that it doesn’t actually “bypass” Kenmore. The road is a State Government initiative intended to speed car travel from the leafy western suburbs into the city. Admittedly, the traffic situation on the western arterials is horrendous, but many Kenmore folk are worried about the impact on their suburb, lifestyle and land values, especially since it isn’t clear how directly the road will advantage them. Some residents (including my informant) are being threatened with resumptions.

As SOK’s main site puts it:

This site represents the effort of a large community united to find a better alternative to the Moggill Pocket Sub Arterial (Stage One and Two), which includes the so-called Kenmore Bypass. This proposed major road would slice through the reserve corridor from Kenmore to North Tivoli and many suburbs in between. Stage One starts by dividing Kenmore, and this is where all the threatened communities must make their stand to stop Stage Two.

Kenmore is a pretty solidly middle-class suburb, and obviously there are more than a few web-literate folk who are opposed to this road. They not only have a blog (which seems well-patronised) but a Facebook group!

Read more…

blogging activism, blogging, Brisbane, hyperlocal, protest, Queensland

(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 a previous post, I’ve already mentioned Megan Boler’s edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I’ve now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan’s interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

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blogging, citizen journalism academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism

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 awhile, an impending, much-anticipated election, and maybe (ironically) the MSM’s very prominent fulminations against them, brought these psephs to the attention of a wider audience.

The audience stayed because these blokes (and they are all blokes) write well, know what they’re talking about, offer comprehensive information archives and/or new and useful interpretations of polling material, and have an infectious enthusiasm for the mechanics of electoral politics and polling. In the last little while, I’ve interviewed both Possum and William Bowe from Poll Bludger. These interviews will be appearing soon in published forms, but what came through strongly in my conversations with both of them was that their main motivations were pretty altruistic. They were driven mostly by a desire to share information and knowledge, t to talk to others with similar interests and (especially in Possum’s case) to correct the grave calumnies in the MSM’s “interpretations” of polling. Of course, they also get kudos, job offers (Possum now writes regularly for Crikey), lots of readers and the pleasure of the odd smackdown, but fundamentally they’re working to educate their audience in a pretty specialised branch of knowledge. (That’s how the blogosphere “gift economy” works, as Margaret Simons book argues far more eloquently than I could.) As a result, many readers, including myself, now have the words “margin of error” forever embazoned on their minds, will never read the Australian’s Newspoll wrap in the same way again, and wonder daily whether their $1.30 is really money well spent.

Read more…

Graham Young, blogging academic, blogging, Graham Young, Margaret Simons, Mumble, Poll Bludger, polling, Possum Comitatus, psephology, What the People Want

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, it’s a little less than the proportion of South Australians who voted for Family First in the 2007 Senate Election (2.89%), and far less than the proportion of my fellow Queenslanders who decided to vote for Pauline Hanson’s United Australia Party in the Senate (4.2%).

I guess that conversations about influence, even if they are proposals to use two-step models to talk about the blogosphere’s influence, really need to account for survey findings like this.

There are some more useful tidbits in Norton’s post about the characteristics of blog readers (along with caveats about generalising too much from what ends up being a pretty small group of respondents).

30%… had done some work for a party or candidate. Only 25% voted Liberal in 2007 (slightly below the proportion who gave their party ID as Liberal). Many of the others were serious Howard haters, with more than half the sample rating their feelings about John Howard at 1 or 2 on a scale that ran from 1 ‘Strongly dislike’ to 10 ‘Strongly like’. They were more than twice as likely to feel that way about the former PM than the sample as a whole. By contrast, no readers of political blogs seriously disliked Rudd, compared to about 8% of the sample as a whole.

So, politically active, strongly left-leaning, and very predisposed to disliking Howard. (I wonder how much wanting to see Howard go down was a stimulus to consuming more of all forms of political information for some people during the last campaign.)

Also, Norton reports that they tended to be younger (with a quarter born in the 1980s), more likely to have attended a private school, and relatively balanced in terms of gender.

blogging, readership, surveys Andrew Norton, blogging, influence, readership, statistics, surveys