Successful blogging

Deborah Hill Cone divorces Facebook

Deborah Hill Cone announced her departure from Facebook in todays Business Herald. Two weeks ago she was advocating it.

I know how she feels. I have an ambivalent relationship with Facebook. I have gone from doing several updates a day to doing barely 1 update a week. I am considering another friend purge to reduce it from my current 27. There are probably five that I interact with on a regular basis.

A couple of weeks ago I got tired of regular status updates promoting a nasty little Facebook group attacking a media personality. I have no idea of the rights and wrongs of what was being said but I didn't want it appearing in my stream. Being forced to read words that I found vulgar and unpleasant.

I have a similar relationship with blogging. There is stuff that I read on blogs that I know is blatantly hypocritical. Public figures being lampooned and criticized for behavior that the bloggers themselves have engaged in. Or bloggers representing themselves in one way when the truth is very different.

Facebook and blogging are harmless pursuits for 99% of those who engage in them. For a few people they are as dangerous and damaging as any addiction.

Wellington AKA ?

A post by David Farrar has got us wondering: if Wellington was a blogger, what would it's pseudonym be ?

TWO THOUSAND AND ONE

We have written 2001 posts since August 2008.  Phew.... 

MICROBLOGGING

You might have noticed we have been playing a bit with micro blogging.. Be interested in readers thoughts - I see that some of the links havent been working so well and ping.fm isnt so good for blog posts.
Be interested if anyone has any better microblog multisend platforms that fit the blogger template better.

SONG FOR THE WET DUCK

Well forsooth! Ace lefty blogger Trevor Mallard shows once more his soft yearning for Cactus Kate - or pray tell is it a spot of granite desire?

We saw the petals of virtual love open here when he breathlessly shouted out the thorny ones name in parliament.

Our prickly pikelet princess then returned his favour, laying gifts of adoration at his feet

So yet again he sings her praises.. Is she the political siren on whose rock he will wreck?

Call him home Cactus - Call him home.....

INVITATION TO BLOGGERS AND BLOG LOVERS

We will be attending this - its guaranteed to be fascinating, fun and informative. Fran is one of the few journalists who was quick to understand the power of blogs. She is simply one of the finest columnists this country has, and her influence is legend.

And its free!

Anyway the Rural women are welcoming anyone who is interested in attending. Just email your acceptance as per the emails below.

You are invited to the next breakfast meeting of the RWNZ Wellington
Network Group, to be held on Tuesday 29 September. Please tell your friends
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: Horticulture New Zealand Boardroom
Level 2 Huddart Parker Building Post Office Square
(opposite Queen's Wharf)
Central Wellington


Breakfast: There is no charge for attending RWNZ breakfast meetings. There is a café on the ground floor or the French Coffee cart in square if you
want to purchase food or coffee. Coffee is also provided at the meeting.

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

or

Tracy Galland: tracygalland@xtra.co.nz

IS THE WILD WEST ABOUT TO BE TAMED?

Maybe, there was an interesting yarn on Stuff today about a model, Liskula Cohen using the court get google to out a blogger who was defaming her.

It was a pretty ugly blog incident.

Stephen Franks, has a considered piece on the issue.

We reckon it is only a matter of time that defamation proceedings are bought against a blogger.

STUDENT JOURNO WRITES WELL.

This is a great piece on blogging by student journo Sandra Dickson who is part of Jim Tuckers Whitireia school for budding scribes . It is an easy read, lots of quotes from interesting people, balanced and informative. We hope to see this fine woman in print or broadcasting one day. She is waaaay too good for the one eyed brain sucker.

DID RIGHT-wing bloggers cost Helen Clark the last election? “Traditional” commentators ridicule the idea, but some in the blogosphere see signs that it is an influential participant in politics.

FOR LONG-SERVING political journalist Colin James, blog content is “trite” and “trivial”.

James – until recently a columnist for the NZ Herald, now writing for the opposition Dominion-Post – believes blogs in New Zealand currently have little, if any, impact on voter behaviour.

But others are taking a different view as the 2008 election is picked over.

Canterbury University mass communications lecturer Donald Matheson says the internet and blogging in particular have challenged the “authoritative voice” of journalism by “watching the watchdog”.

“The relationship between journalism and the big news organisations and the people reading those has changed. Good journalism should welcome that, a bit of critique, a bit of needling. It’s a healthy thing.”

Political bloggers in New Zealand do see themselves as watching the watchdog on issues such as electoral finance reform, copyright law and, last year, the monitoring of Winston Peters (below right) and New Zealand First.

One of the country’s leading political columnists Matthew Hooton – who entered the blogosphere himself last election – argues this watchdog role may have influenced the outcome of the 2008 election.

Read more here

And isn't Colin James a tosser, his column gets dropped from the Herald and he is now writing for the Dom Post but its bloody boring. We are lovers of Fran O'Sullivan and Rob Hosking both have offerings that are tasty and satisfying - like Lambshanks at Boulcott. James on the other hand is toast made out of cheap supermarket white bread.

WAR OF WORDS IN UK - SCALP TO GUIDO

There is only one NZ political blogger who shows any inkling of the flair shown by the king of political bloggers Guido Fawkes and that's Whale Oil.

Guido's recent expose has seen a close advisor to Gordon Brown forced to resign after he was found to have been involved in setting up a " black ops " site to poke the borax at the Tories.

It appears that the capers of Brown's advisor known as McPoison, were being taken to new heights.
Smears were going to be posted on a site called Red Rag

And in a parallel with the rise of blogs here, the force of the on line commentariat is now have a direct impact on British Politics.

Is this the new age of news and information?

This excerpt from the Sunday Herald on the Rise and rise of political Blogs shows that while blogs are often rough and ready they are self correcting.

"We've really had a decade and a bit of the growing influence of blogs," said McNair, "and Guido Fawkes is one of the most influential in the UK."

McNair, one of Scotland's foremost media experts, believes Paul Staines' claims to employ traditional journalistic skills are well-founded.

"If it's someone known to be reasonably reliable and who has good inside sources, then in that sense a blog has the same values and the same skills as traditional media: who you know, how you cultivate sources," he said.

And while critics quite reasonably point out that blogs are unedited and generally display the limitations and fallibility of one sole writer, the vicious, cannibalistic nature of the wider blogosphere lends a natural check to any inaccuracies on the larger blogging sites.

McNair added: "Blogs are just as reliable as print - in one sense more. They are checked and double checked, and other bloggers will descend on them like a pack of hungry wolves if there's any inaccuracy. I don't think you can get away with mistakes much on the blogosphere."

We agree. If we get it wrong we know within minutes. Other bloggers are the toughest critics of their own and that leads to the robustness of their offerings. We and the other blogs of our ilk have become more than just opinionated political freaks.

We are leading, breaking and criticising the quality of the stories on offer to the public. We do it part - time and for free. For us - its a return to the cut and thrust of the mainstream media with our readers and fellow bloggers becoming the editors. We think it is a new dawn and it is tough to keep up with the pace of change or the tools available to give readers a better product but it so much fun we cant see us giving up anytime soon.

SHOULD NZ HAVE ITS OWN HUFF POST INVESTIGATIVE FUND?

We think that this is a great idea - open source reporting and a fund to back it. The Huffington Post is the number one blog in the world.

Here is the article on what maybe the most exciting advance in online reporting.

Already Blogs in NZ are making an impact.
whaleoil
roarprawn
Kiwiblog
Cactuskate have all broken stories.

WIKI-ING AND TWEETING BUT NO HOLOCAUST

The Guardian in the UK is reporting a huge shake up in the primary school curriculum in the UK. Blogging, Twittering and Wiki will be standard options but out goes the Holocaust and Victorian studies. Chronology of history will be taught - the what but not the why, nor the impact.

We think that it is great that kids get their heads around the new communication mediums that are growing at an exponential rate but history should still be taught to remind them of evil that man can do.

Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must accumulate before they are 11 to allow schools greater flexibility in what they teach.

It emphasises traditional areas of learning - including phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic - but includes more modern media and web-based skills as well as a greater focus on environmental education.

The plans have been drawn up by Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief who was appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, and are due to be published next month.

The papers seen by the Guardian are draft plans for the detailed content of each of six core "learning areas" that Rose is proposing should replace the current 13 standalone subject areas.

• Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain "fluency" in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.

• Children to be able to place historical events within a chronology. "By the end of the primary phase, children should have gained an overview which enables them to place the periods, events and changes they have studied within a chronological framework, and to understand some of the links between them." Every child would learn two key periods of British history but it would be up to the school to decide which ones. Schools would still be able to opt to teach Victorian history or the second world war, but they would not be required to. The move is designed to prevent duplication with the secondary curriculum, which covers the second world war extensively.

• Less emphasis on the use of calculators than in the current curriculum.

• An understanding of physical development, health and wellbeing programme, which would address what Rose calls "deep societal concerns" about children's health, diet and physical activity, as well as their relationships with family and friends. They will be taught about peer pressure, how to deal with bullying and how to negotiate in their relationships.

The six core areas are: understanding English, communication and languages, mathematical understanding, scientific and technological understanding, human, social and environmental understanding, understanding physical health and wellbeing, and understanding arts and design.

Read the whole article here

LISTENING TO JOHN KEY

We are off to listen to John Key this morning - we may blog later.

GOOD NEWS - GOVT TO BIFF COPYRIGHT LAW

Tom Puller- Stricker from the Dom Post knows his stuff so we reckon he will be on the button - and he is saying Section 92 the odious copyright act is gonna be scrapped -

COOOOL .

BLOG ROUND UP

Newest blog Marty Mars Mars to Earth

Marty has been appearing often as a very reasoned commentator on Ngai Tahu issues. He is definitely a lefty but is very interested in Ngai Tahu issues. good luck with the blog Marty.


Funniest post has to be Cactus for thinking that detergent was some nose candy. Silly tart. Then again we suspect that its been a long time since Cactus used a washing machine or an oven.

And for best campaign - its WhaleOil and his dogged attempts to show the public what a cock the North Shore Mayor of Auckland is.

WAY COOL

We keep a close eye on who is watching us and today we were fascinated to find  that we are being tracked by Media Monitors. Whale Oil has blogged on the fact he is being monitored by Chongs. We are now being recognised as  a legitimate part of the media landscape. Coooool...

COHEN FUNNY FOR ONCE

NBR's David Cohen is one of the country's most acerbic and occasionally entertaining writers and he attempts to heap scorn on our mate and blogging collegue David P Farrar over his comments re blogs not getting credit for breaking stories. We think that Cohen is pissed about bloggers because secretly he wants to be one. He is way to precious about the MSM. There is revolution taking place. He needs to get with the programme.

BARRY OBAMA - FULL OF SHIT?

Is anyone else out there just a little concerned about the god like status that Obama has in the US?
Now we applauded the US for appointing an African - American to the Presidency. It probably would have been more historic it has been a native American but thats bye the bye. But the hype the rhetoric and the adulation is leaving us more than a little fearful. Not PC has a good analysis of the strong left wing bias that Barry has. It makes for disturbing reading.
The trade implications for NZ are also worrrying.

I hope for the sake of the US and the rest of the world that Barry delivers on the hopes dreams and the needs of his people. Sadly we think he will go down as the worst President in living memory.

Interestingly we just tried to search the net for recent stories that criticise Obama. The few that are there are months old. Is there a tool that can purge the net of negative stories ? Some bloggers are convinced the Chinese used a purging tool to ensure the world did not know the extent of the San Lu scandal. Could the US be doing the same?

MOTELLA - WELCOME TO THE VRWC

Heres a newish blog we like. Its fun and likes taking the piss. - Just as good blogs should.

WOULD MCCARTHY MAKE A BETTER BLOGGER THAN A BROADCASTER?

After all we are the kings and queens of borrowing other peoples work - mind you we do tend to attribute it.

Noelle says sorry. Poor wee poppet. We will be interested to see what it does to her career long term.. Plagiarism is a still one of the no no's in Journalism.