gatewatching

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

Newspoll Tuesday has become a bit of an occasion in the Australian blogosphere. The influence of the pseph bloggers, the moments of antagonism between the blogosphere and the Oz last year, the motivation to enter into further fruitful dialogue with Dennis Shanahan, and the urge to take Dr Nelson’s temperature have meant that most of the major blogs will offer some opinion on the latest numbers.

Today’s no exception. The headline news, which even Mr Shanahan has forced himself to read out, is that Nelson’s surge is over for the moment, and that Labor has boosted its support at the Coalition’s expense. Nice takes include Tree of Knowledge’s snarky rhetorical questions and disturbing photoshopping, Kim at LP’s questions about the media’s real influence on public opinion, Andrew Bolt’s call for Dr Nelson’s head, and Tim Dunlop’s scepticism about the whole concept of a “Honeymoon”. Pride of place, as always, goes to the psephos takes - Pollbludger’s discussion thread, Mumble’s spin smackdowns, and Possum’s detailed analysis (including wonky graphics and a Pollytracker update).

Yes, Newspoll Tuesday gives a warm fuzzy feeling of regularity for the blogosphere connoisseur. But it may be more important than that. Even though it’s based on an MSM poll, it might show that the Australian blogosphere is developing it’s own news cycles and temporality. The peculiar trajectory of the development of political blogging here (as well as the features of Australian democracy) mean that, at least once a fortnight, everyone is talking about the same thing.

Uncategorized blogosphere, Bolt, Dennis Shanahan, Larvatus Prodeo, Mumble, Newspoll, Poll Bludger, Possum Comitatus, psephology, The Australian, Tree of Knowledge

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

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.

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

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

Graham Young has started releasing a polling series measuring the impact of the Rudd Government’s first budget. Graham is On Line Opinion’s founder and chief, and our colleague in the ARC citizen journalism project. But he’s also been pioneering the use of online qualitative polling over an extended period, and lately he’s been testing new tools that analyse his panel’s responses in innovative ways.

Although there’s more to come, Graham’s results so far suggest that the Government got the politics of the budget right. WTPW’s real interest is in its qualitative insights, but the raw numbers show that Swan’s budget was a hit with the Labor base, and has entrenched the sense that Dr Nelson is incompetent, even among Liberal voters. Graham concludes:

This poll was taken before (Nelson’s) address-in-reply so it may have improved after that. However, what it says is that while the budget didn’t win Rudd any votes, it lost Nelson some. You’ll have to wait for the qual to find out why, but my strong suspicion would be that it is to do with his performance.

In the first batch of qual, Graham analyses what the panel said they approved of in the budget, and uses lexical analysis software Leximancer to pull out the main threads, or “concepts”, in their responses.

Read more…

Graham Young budget, Glenn Milne, Graham Young, Kevin Rudd, Leximancer, polling, Possum Comitatus, Wayne Swan, What the People Want