BLOGGERS BEING BADLY TREATED BY PR COMPANIES?

Well Aussie online marketing guru Lee Hopkins reckons that its about time that the PR industry across the ditch treated Bloggers with a bit more respect.

We agree - especially the bloggers who are subject matter experts.

Bloggers are here to stay. And their influence will grow and the PR industry whether it be here or Aussie ignore them at their peril.

His very interesting take on the Debate is here .

A NOD IS AS GOOD AS A WINK TO A BLIND HORSE

We noticed a bit of traffic today from hitherto unknown quarters. We had a look see and it was coming from Dimpost. We dont read dim that much - we know he has a strong following on both the left and right simply because he understands and uses to great effect satire. However, to us, most of the time his satire seems more like its low brow cousin - sarcasm.

Anyway we think , (we apparently don't have the intellectual capacity for great thought) that Dim has called us a bobblehead. For a nano second we thought he might have meant booby head - but no we put on our nana portholes and read closely to see it was indeed bobble head. Which was a bit better than being called a sucky licky person.

Now we do not mind being called an intellectual pygmy , we have enough big brained mates to do all the grunt work for us , we are waay to busy to analyse everything this world has on offer but we are not nor will ever be an acquiescing bobble head. We might not be a deep thinker but we remain an independent thinker and we think a lot .Maybe its our frequency of thought that dilutes its potency.

n the matter of bobbleheads in fact we were famous for 3 minutes once for publicly giving Sir Tipene O' Regan a tiki bobble head so that he didnt have the worry of shaking his head off saying yes to all the deals the government offered him.

And for the record we supported the notion of Anti Earth Hour. But as we stated in a post linking to their blog site - we would be treating Earth Hour with the contempt it deserves - which for us meant ignoring it.

So Dim. We revel in our small brainedness but we remain staunchly independent in thought and in deed. And for the record Dim. We are cuzzies.

OOOPS

We, like Cactus Kate, have a pretty jaded view of politicians. However, every now and then one does something that requires a bit of praise. Tau Henare got a bit of praise from us for giving up smoking.

He did it publicly, in an effort to ensure that he would stay true to his pledge. We were delighted. We could see that because he has a high profile in his own community, his public attempt to do good, could in turn do even more good for his community.

Now at one stage we worked pretty closely with Tau - so we got the measure of him. He is " good people" as we say. Sure he was seduced by parliament when he was with Winston and he left and he made an attempt to set up his own party. And he can be an arrogant bombastic shit. but give him a good argument and he will back you to the hilt.

Now Tau has one thing that we think is a big strength. He is at heart a good bastard. He may not be a rocket scientist, in fact he might even have trouble spelling scientist but he is a likable flawed, gruff, character. He has done okay in life, and he has a big rollicky whanau who love him to bits. Sometimes money isn't the end all but family is definitely a big indicator in the success stakes.

Its something we learned many years ago when we lost a sizeable chunk of our capital.

So it is with some sorrow that we started what has been a fairly torrid flame war between Cactus and Tau.

It goes like this - we write about Tau and smoking.
Cactus thinks that Tau can not be a role model - not because he a Maori but because he is a politician.

Tau gets the wrong end of the stick and calls Cactus a Racist on Facebook.

Cactus does a literary Hannibal Lecter on Tau and dines with gusto on his inadaquacies.

Now we are adding our ten cents worth.


Now some of what she says is right, politicians on the whole are not the nicest bunch of people.
They tend to be big on ego. But some of them are good bastards at heart.

And there are a heap of Maori out there who owe their entire living to the treaty gravy train. She is right about that too. Its not necessarily a bad thing. the treaty train troughing is not limited to Maori and hell someone has to do it.

And yip Cactus is right -Tau can be a dick at times, but a lot of people from all walks of life quite like that big Westie dick. And he was a bit off saying Cactus is racist. She is not and never will be a racist. She hates laziness, people with no ambition and dud roots. Although she could show a bit more fortitude around the dud roots.

And at the end of the day she is a trougher as well. She is in a service industry for rich people. She is their financial house keeper - so to speak. She has not taken a risk and made anything except a deposit with other peoples money.

No widgets, no own company. It will come, we think, but at the moment she is a reliant on the good fortune of others to make a living. So she sells a service. She is very good at that service. she is in demand. She worked out what skills she had and she worked out how best she could utilise those skills to make the most money the quickest way possible so she can retire in a fashion she considers appropriate to her needs. Good on her.

Tau knows his strengths too. He is good at politics. Not ever going to be chairman of the board but he is pretty good in a select committee and when he was a Minister he got a few things done. He makes enough money to look after his family well and enjoy the things that, to him and his whanau, mean the most in life.

Bit like Cactus really.

Now the weird thing is Cactus and Tau, once they get over hissing at each other, will become good friends - they are poles apart and always will be. Both are flawed and both are good at the core. And that is something that they will recognise in each other. As we know that a good core is what both of them value most in others.

Cant wait to host that lunch.....

THE POWER OF BLOGS

Well they apparently do work as marketing tools.

The Little sis of BB - the pod princess known as Lambcut organised a wee soiree for the Rural Women of NZ -with guest speaker Fran O'Sullivan and her take on blogs.

It was expected to be a small function - its grown a bit - so much so the venue has now changed - to one of our favourite bars - D4...

The power of new media - its seems.

You are invited to the next breakfast meeting of the RWNZ Wellington Network Group, to be held on Tuesday 29 September. Please feel free to pass this message onto your staff and colleagues.

Speaker: Fran O’Sullivan

Topic: An Accidental Empire: The Rise of Political Blogging and its Effect on Conventional Media.

RWNZ is delighted to have special guest Fran O’Sullivan - a columnist for the New Zealand Herald - speaking at this month’s breakfast meeting on the rise of political blogging. Fran's expertise is in politics and business. She was labelled a "right-wing blogger" by Helen Clark - but has yet to launch her own blog.

Time: 7.15am – 8.15 a.m.

Venue: D4 on Featherston Street

Level 1, 143 Featherston St,

PO Box 5815,

Central Wellington

Breakfast: There is no charge for attending RWNZ breakfast meetings. A D4 Breakfast Special costing $12 has been arranged for this occasion. The Special includes bacon, a choice of eggs on toast, and tea or coffee and juice. Or, you can order a continental breakfast with jam and marmalade served with juice, tea or coffee for $12. If you have a little more time, you may wish to order from any of the full range of dishes available on D4’s superb breakfast menu which can be viewed at www.d4.co.nz/menu

Please RSVP to Noeline Holt: noeline.holt@ruralwomen.org.nz

or

Tracy Galland: tracygalland@xtra.co.nz

BLOGGERS VS MAIN STREAM

Debra Hill-Cone has bloggers all in a lather over her comments about blogging. Sure bloggers poke the borax at MSM writers - we do it because we can. Blogging is about commentary, its loose its unruly, its unstructured and its bloody powerful. Of that we are in absolutely no doubt.

Here is her article.

I can understand that print journalists harbour a certain enmity towards bloggers and those unshaven "new media" types whose office is a cafe. I doubt horse-drawn carriage artisans were big Henry Ford fans either. But what I find intriguing is how bitter and twisted "new media" types are about the rapidly atrophying old media.

Hardly bitter and twisted - just derisive, and scathing.

The Newspaper Association of America met this week to hear Google chief executive Eric Schmidt - a cheery gathering I'll be bound - and one tech-loving blogger Jeff Jarvis posted an alternative speech he thinks the old-school print wallahs should have heard. It wasn't so much a speech as a giant raspberry. "You've had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and Craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs

and Google to understand the changes in the media economy ... to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn't. You blew it." The print media - "angry, old, white, men" - was out of touch and arrogant and should get the hell out the way to let a new generation of net natives "who care about the news" take over.

Well, ex-squeeze me. Jarvis giving the bird to bastard bigwigs doesn't shed any light on how the media might turn a buck so we can fund quality journalism. All this old versus new media aggro is just a distraction from the fact that neither Jarvis, nor Rupert Murdoch, nor any of the hundreds who posted responses to Jarvis' speech, has an answer for the future of journalism. So it's much easier to just snipe at each other.

Well Debs is right there. And we have pondered this one as well. Remember journalism is the vehicle used to sell advertising.There are very few subscription only tomes that have survived.

In New Zealand bloggers are also getting snarky at their print counterparts. Right-wing blogger Cameron Slater, known as Whale Oil, who has broken stories including the scandal of Winston Peters' ministerial car, seems desperate to start a turf war with print journalists. He has been firing shots at journalists Jonathan Milne, Ali Ikram, and Damien Christie for daring to make controversial statements on social networking site Twitter. Presumably he

sees Twitter as his personal territory. One item was headed "More Journos make twatters of themselves" while in another Slater suggests the print journos ought to be fired. Are we really on opposite sides? I never realised I was supposed to choose which camp I belonged in. I thought I was just a journalist.

Thats the thing - we arent journalists, we are the rebel outriders who tell stories and offer opinion and we we do it mostly in written " sound bites" We may once have been journalists but now we are more commentators and largely we do it for fun. That really sets us apart from the MSM pack.

As for quality, that will ultimately be decided by the readers - they will go to the outlets that give them what they want.

JOURNO JONO A TWITTER TWAT

Barnsley Bill has been sifting through some tweet from some twits. And finds some off colour utterances by the Herald on Sunday Dep editor. His twee tweets have now been silenced.
Not a good look for paid scribes.
Dave at Big News has some more

Whale Oil has a great round up of Tweetgate.

We are sitting drinking wine with Lambcut in the sun. No more blogging till this evening.