WHY CACTUS IS THE BEST

While all bloggers have had a field day over the politicians and their dodgy expenses, Cactus gets to the nub of it. Her experience of spending a fair chunk of her working life on planes and hotels means she has the knowledge to back up her assertions. In short she condemns all of the troughing apart from Tim Groser's penchant for a drink at the end of a hard day.

Cactus recently won the Air New Zealand Blogger of the Year.It was judged by her peers from all points on the political compass. She has ripped the lid off a number of scandals and her witty and acerbic writing style leaves the rest of the NZ blogosphere in her wake.

But she is not just one of the best writers among the legion of bloggers - she stands tall among all commentators and journalists in NZ. That she does it while offshore and holding down a big boys job is even more fascinating and testament to her skills as a writer who has made the blog domain her own.

She also has a strong following among the country's top businessmen and women as well as politicians and journalists.

So three cheers for her and we will crack a bottle of Moet at Boulcott with our good mate when she is here next.

COMPANIES OFFICE LEADS GOVT DEPARTMENT USE OF THE NET

Well we think so. We love their site. You can easily find all sorts of interesting shit about people for a minimal cost and they make registering as a company, and all the stuff you have to do really easy. And now we have just learnt that they have a blog.

This is great stuff. We hope more govt departments set up something similar..

HAERE RA

Well folks its good bye from us. We were going to do all sorts of weird shit tonight to keep people guessing about why Roarprawn ceased operating at midnight tonight.

The simple fact of the matter is that we are going to work for a Ministry full time. Yip a public servant gig. As my mum says - a real job...We start tomorrow.

And the State Services Act is a bit of a bitch if you want to be a political commentator. Now we are fairly well positioned as a National Govt cheer leader but from time to time we have to put down our pom poms and give them a piece of our mind and , well you cant do that when you are a public servant. And we are not all that anonymous. After all we have been on telly.

We have had a ball blogging , its fun, outrageous and has ignited the old journo within. We were starting to get some decent numbers again too - up around the 1000 a day.

Now, who knows what will happen in the future - so we wont delete the prawn - but we will locked it away for a while. If someone wants to buy it - well email me on bustedblonde@gmail.com

To all my fellow bloggers, keep up the bastards honest.


Love you all...... BB

ONLINE NEWS UP FOR SALE?

Rupert Murdoch says within a year people will be paying for online Newspapers. he's been selling a version of the Wall Street journal for a while and on the back of that success he is looking at applying the same regime to other papers in his stable.
Guido sees the future clearly He calls it the Blogalypse.

The new age cometh. The dead tree press days are numbered. Imagine what that will do to save the planet.

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.

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.

WE ARE GOING ON A BLOG HOLIDAY - AND WE WILL BE GONE FOR SOMETIME

We have blogoholism. It is very similar to being under the spell of the piss fairy. So we are going to go away dig gardens, eat whitebait, catch and smoke eels and receive some intensive counselling. We will drink good wine, like a nice bottle of Winston Churchill and another of Hill of Grace we have been saving to celebrate the ebbing of the red tide and the dismissal of Winston and of course, the Maori Party being offered political partnership. We are also writing a book - but its not about scampi but about spies and fish and stuff.
We would like to thank you all for your support - and we had heaps of it. Just on 3000 of you tuned in one day and by the end of the day we will have clocked over 65,000 visitors since we started late in August.
Maybe in time, we will do another blog thats just about food and wine - but not for a while.
We remain and will always be true Blue. We think we got just the Right mix in the end so to speak. Because we also support the Maori Party. And we think John Key is going to be a very very good Prime Minister. So thanks to all the grumpy buggers on the Left who gave us lots of information for us to share with everyone. And double thanks to the journos who helped us and whom we helped a bit in return.

If you need to contact us BB will take care of all correspondence so email her on bustedblonde@gmail.com

So from
Bustedblonde
The Brunette
3 Maori prawns
Designing prawn
hairy oyster
the sweeper
steamy boy
whetu chini
diplomatic prawn
dining prawn
the strapper
Wanaka fisherman
and of course Spaz,
Arohanui and

See You On the Tide

WHALE OIL TAKES HOAX LETTERS TO POLICE

Bloody good job. - Will be interesting to see if the police have the forensic ability to track down the little shits who were going to smear an MP as part of a campaign to undermine the centre right and right wing bloggers.

Silly and very nasty people.

Heres more at Whale Oil

blogging under threat

Just when I thought that I had found a creative outlet for the ghost old journalist that still lurks within, that No Minister has blogged on that fact that this brave new frontier may soon see the emergence of sheriffs and posses.

Bummer.. I quite like the free for all format. Its a bit like the rules of parliament - without having to be an MP.

And I see Poneke's being all pious.. now Poneke is a delightfully elegant writer who loves things that go click, whir and bang but he's a bit off beam on the hoax story.

Im with Queen Bee, at the Hive

I think the issue would be sorted quite quicklyif the police were given the matter to examine.