gatewatching

This is my first post upon re-entry to academic life - I am now lecturing at the University of Wollongong and I am based in the beautiful Illawarra region. I’ll have more time and capacity to devote to my participation in this blog from now on, and I’m able to have a broader view of the issues Gatewatching has always dealt with, now that I’m no longer neck deep in the business of being a full-time practitioner.

The occasion for this post is the wash-up from Katherine Wilson’s hoaxing of Keith Windschuttle. I’m a little late on this, and my only excuse is the trauma of moving cities for the sixth time in five years. Most readers who are familiar with the Australian media and blogosphere will be across the details, so I won’t rehearse them here. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, and want a blow-by-blow account from near the centre of the action, check out the archive over at Margaret Simons’ place. There are also many astute analyses of the situation online.  For mine, Graham Young’s at On Line Opinion is the most sustained and productive reflection on the incident to date, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions.

First, a disclaimer: I enjoyed the hoax immensely, I think it worked, I think Windschuttle had it coming, and I think his excuses exceeded even the hoax itself for entertainment value. Among other things, his explanations show him appealing for slack that he has never been prepared to cut for other scholars. I think Margaret Simons behaved ethically throughout, and in my view most suggestions that the hoax wasn’t worth doing proceed largely from political or personal axe-grinding.

Read more…

Graham Young, blogging, citizen journalism academia, blogging, citizen journalism, Crikey, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, newspapers

An upbeat piece about politics and the internet on New Matilda here.

Is there anything to look forward to? The gnomes running the internet have given us a few reasons to be optimistic about journalism and democracy.

The US is finally stepping up and implementing some of those e-democracy initiatives they’ve been promising since AOL, and Obama’s Change.gov is an encouraging sign that they might actually be serious about it. Obama’s good on net neutrality too, which bodes well for continued internet access.

Locally, however, Stephen Conroy is dead keen to slow down the Australian internet so Clive Hamilton can steam open every email to check for child porn prior to delivery, but public opinion, technical implementation and, uh, reality are putting the brakes on his plan. The campaign against the so-called Clean Feed is a great example of how new media technologies are "hyper-empowering" (for lack of a better term) ordinary people. A relatively small group of highly connected people on Twitter sparked a loud online campaign that feed into initiatives by the EFA, the Greens and later on GetUp that has comprehensively upset Conroy’s plans. While Conroy will no doubt push onwards, the online environment has allowed these single issue activists to run rings around Conroy and Hamilton’s free speech = child porn argument. The outburst on Twitter no doubt contributed to the appearance of @turnbullmalcolm and @kevinruddpm on Twitter.

Some discussion of the article on LP here.

Uncategorized Barack Obama, Crikey, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, Poll Bludger, Possum Comitatus

Just a quick one, but I thought it worth noting that Crikey has snagged some of Australia’s best, and some of my favourite bloggers. You can see the line-up on the Crikey blogs page. The great psephs, Possum Comitatus and William Bowe, have now gone full time over to Crikey from their respectiveformer haunts. Andrew Bartlett seems to be there at least part-time, and other bloggers represented include Crikey editor Jonathan Green, Charlie Happel (on sport) and Crikey’s incomparable cartoonist First Dog on the Moon.

It seems like the psephs have successfully taken their audiences with them. I don’t know the details, but I’d wager there might be a retainer in it for the head-counters, and rightly so. Possum has been very productive since arriving at the new site, pumping out more posts than usual, and the Poll Bludger’s comments threads are still in the hundreds.

I posted a little while back about a possible “tipping-point”, where bloggers were perhaps starting to turn over enough dough to make at least part of a living. Obviously Crikey has seen the potential for monetising these bloggers’ audiences, and they have done a great job of putting them on the Crikey site, using Wordpress for a blogging platform.

It’s a much more sympathetic use of blogging than we’ve had so far from any of the big media organisations. It figures. Crikey are much closer to the groundswell of expert political blogging, and have had Possum and William Bowe writing in the newsletter over a long period. They also have more to gain by getting this right. While sometimes its easy to feel like big media are attempting to co-opt bloggers, Crikey has every reason to promote these voices, to develop their audience, and associate them with the Crikey brand.

Anyhow - good luck to all concerned. To one observer at least, it seems a positive, and potentially important development in Australia’s political blogosphere.

Uncategorized Andrew Bartlett, Crikey, Poll Bludger, Possum Comitatus

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

Update: For those prepared to contemplate the erotic allure of blogspot profile photos in relation to the Henson debate, the NSFW (language) Grodsthink for this week should provide some food for thought.

This week, in the tissues and the blogosphere, there has been a lot of discussion of art, and its “evil twin” pornography, in relation to some photos. A lot of it’s been that simplistic - either Bill Henson’s photos are art or porn, either we should plump for “freedom of expression” or the “protection of children”. In this sense, many responses have amounted to little more than a less-than-helpful jerking of the knees.

For mine, neither one side’s claims to be speaking for common decency and the Law, nor the other side’s gratuitous displays of cultural authority or browbeating dismissals of “philistinism” have been particularly enlightening. The whole debate so far has caused nothing but confusion for some people, not least pollsters in some metropolitan tabloid newspapers.

(Image from Yesterday’s Crikey) Read more…

Daily Telegraph academia, art, Bill Henson, Bolt, Crikey, criticism, Daily Telegraph, Larvatus Prodeo, Mentalization-Positive, Sorrow at Sills Bend

UPDATE: I missed Tim Lambert’s contribution to the Quiggin/Young bout.

First in a new series offering links to fresh and robust stoushing. I’ll try a longer post about snark and stoushing later this week!

BANG!!!

John Quiggin replies to Graham Young’s On Line Opinion piece on warming “bullying” with an invocation of Godwin’s law. (Look down the comments for a further reply from Graham)

THUMP!!!

Grods issues a new entry in a snarky series on Alexander Downer: Blogger.

THWACK!!!

Jeremy Sear takes on Guy Rundle’s arguments (locked up in yesterday’s Crikey) on gay marriage.

Be careful out there, and remember, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, etc.

John Quiggin, Stoush Alexander Downer, Crikey, Grods, Jeremy Sear, John Quiggin, snark, Stoush