Grand Theft Hypocrisy

admin —  September 30, 2008 — 7 Comments

News.com.au reports on the ABC being forced to apologize over Tony Jones suggesting in an episode of Q&A that computer games aren’t rated in Australia.

Pretty much a non-story, even if it is on the front page of news.com.au, but given I’ve never watched the show, there was one part that flawed me:

During the episode aired on 24 July, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group Heather Ridout said she found it hard to support violent games.

Ms Ridout said she supported controversial photographer Bill Henson and that it was necessary to view art through “a different prism”, but violent games were “appalling”.

“Grand Theft Auto was one of the more famous games and seemed to turn everyone into a car thief,” she said.

“Violent games… violence, it breeds violence.”

The reference to Bill Henson for those not familiar with it was a case where Henson the artist published nude pics of kiddies, all in the name of art. There was an outcry at the time, and calls for censorship of the mag the pic was published, but it all came to little in the end.

So apparently looking a naked pictures of little kids doesn’t make you a pedophile, but playing GTA makes you a car thief. Hmmmm, I’ve played GTA before, and I don’t seem to have broken into a car yet.

Grand Hypocrisy of the first order.

In Bizarre
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Worst Ruddy speech ever?

admin —  September 26, 2008 — 3 Comments

Apparently the PM spoke at the UN yesterday. The Oz has the full transcript here. The takeaway: look at the sound bites. One line statements after one line statements. Waffles McRudd. Soundbite over substance. Worst Ruddy speech ever. Howard may not have been perfect, but he at least understood that delivering a speech required substance..any substance at all.

In General
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What we going to do when the money runs out?

admin —  September 26, 2008 — 4 Comments

WaMu gets siezed and sold in a fire sale, the $700billion bail out hasn’t passed yet, there are no large investment banks left on Wall Street, China has either completely cut off funds to the US, or in part depending on the report. I even read on FriendFeed that the Saudi’s were holding back money as well.

No matter the outcome, history in the making.

Lets ask David Gray 🙂

If things really get bad, there’s always REM

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Game Over.

admin —  September 25, 2008 — 11 Comments

Chinese banks have been told to immediately stop lending money to the United States, according to Reuters.

Game over.

No. 1 lender of finance to the United States: China. According to AFP, China is the world’s biggest holder of foreign reserves and second biggest holder of US treasury bils. Take Chinese money off the table, $700 billion is likely not enough.

The takeaway line?Ǭ†from “New America Media:

“In times of hardship, China and the United States seem to have traded places. The United States seems to be moving closer to a Communist economy in the wake of the financial implosion, while officially Communist China is hurtling towards capitalism.”

In General
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Brilliant Politics

admin —  September 25, 2008 — 6 Comments

So your poll numbers are tanking so badly that even FoxNews gives Obama a 9pt lead. Your strategy of hiding Caribou Barbie from the evil liberal press has backfired by taking her out of the spotlight, resulting in the positive buzz shifting away from her. You’ve got a serious case of foot in mouth, making one mistake after another. Things are looking grim, and as the economic crisis continues, Obama looks more the man, so what do you do?

You suspend your campaign, and you spin it as a being a statesman like decision for the good of the country, days out from the first debate. You then call on your opponent to do the same, shifting the spotlight back on him, and hope that if he refuses, you look like you’re putting your country before the election.

Brilliant politics.

The only question now though is will voters buy it? McCain had to try something, and this is a bold gambit. If it works the way they hope it’s going to work, Obama looks bad and McCain gets a boost.

However….people might see through the ploy in a campaign that has been thick with lies and deception. But then again, while some might see through it, it’s the swinging voters in battleground states that count. Only time will tell.

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5 To 10 Days Until Cash Dries Up

admin —  September 24, 2008 — 8 Comments

Jim Cramer on MSNBC calls end of the world if the $700 billion bailout isn’t approved. (via Donklephant). Still, bailing out the industry doesn’t fix the problem, it prolongs it. No one wants a great depression, but likewise the concept of bailing out private enterprise from their own muck doesn’t sit right.

In General
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A digital divide of usability

admin —  September 22, 2008 — 6 Comments

So I told my mother on the weekend to try Google Chrome after life long Internet Explorer die-hards and Firefox haters like Steve Hodson tell me that they’re sold and have switched for life. My mother still uses IE and refuses to use Firefox, no matter how many times I’ve tried to convince her otherwise, because it’s “not the same.”

Next day she tells me she tried but, but she didn’t like it and switched back to IE. I ask why, and she says that Chrome doesn’t have the “favorites” (bookmarks for the rest of us) in the sidebar. I had to get her to explain the concept to me. Basically, she has a left hand sidebar open in IE with all her favorite sites, and she doesn’t like using a drop down menu to access them. In my mothers defence, sight isn’t her strong point and she has a large monitor set to the wrong size (at one stage it was 800×600) so she can see things. For her, the sidebar was easier to read than the drop down menu + she’d become use to it.

That’s a digital divide… of usability. Of all the things to consider, I’d have never thought of that.

PS: happy birthday mum.

In Web 2.0
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The Tyranny of Numbers

admin —  September 15, 2008 — 8 Comments

Why is it, in 2008, that blogs in Australia are still not considered mainstream by many, still derided by the media and rarely breaking big news, unlike blogs in the United States, where blogging is mainstream, blogs are often the first port of call for breaking and big news, and where the line between blogging and the media has become so blurred that it’s difficult at the top to tell them apart?

We know that there has never been a break out blog in Australia that targets Australian news. We have great bloggers in many fields, and are strongly represented in the blogosphere, perhaps statistically more so than our population would dictate, and yet our blogging success stories tend to be global stories. Your Darren Rowse or your Yaro Staracks, even the likes of Tim Blair, News Corp deal aside, relied on an American audience more than an Australian one. There are prominent bloggers in Australia who do write for an Australian audience and I don’t seek to belittle what they do, but where’s our Andrew Sullivan, our Drudge or Daily Kos. Why don’t we see our own version of Michelle Malkin on TV, or a Robert Scoble turn up to the opening of an envelope?

There are several schools of thought. That we are behind the United States is a given, and I’ve usually put the figure at 5 years. The blogosphere here feels like the blogosphere in the US in around 2003, prior to the 2004 Presidential election where blogging came of age. There’s the psychological argument that Australian’s aren’t as open as our American friends, that we are more reserved and less likely to publish what we think at will that has stifled our progress. There is a good case against heritage media, who takes nearly every opportunity to bag blogs and blogging, fearful of competition as their glory days pass and the end of their business models are nigh. But there’s one factor we can’t change, one factor that continues to stifle local growth in blogging, and that is numbers.

Numbers dictate that there is not a big enough audience in Australia to sustain mass locally focused and profitable blogging.

It’s why I’ve never launched an Australian focused blog. Some people were suggesting to me last year that there needs to be a TechCrunch for Australia. My response was that there’s not a big enough audience here to sustain such a site. I’ve looked in past years at other vertical spaces, and I keep finding the same problem: great idea, audience is too small.

The reality is that for most wanting to make blogging a full time living in Australia, they have to target an overseas audience.

There are some exceptions. There’s the Auto blog guy who is suppose to be turning 6 figures on a car blog on a .com.au address. I’d bet though that most of his traffic wasn’t Australian. There’s people like Bronwen Clune and Paul Montgomery, who have turned their blogging come tech plays into reasonable money earners, through a combination of tapping into some premium advertising and working in desirable niche spaces. Allure Media’s Gawker titles are going ok the last I heard, but they had a couple of advantages: a pile of money to hire journalists up front, and a redirect deal with Nick Denton that saw Australian traffic hitting the US sites ending up on the Australian sites. Crikey is going where no Australian blogging network has gone before, buying in some great talent and traffic to give them a solid start out of the gate.

But that’s pretty close to it. I may have missed a few, so apologies if I’ve missed you (and please don’t be offended) but I can say with clear certainty that at most I’ve missed is less than I can count fingers on my hands.

No amount of spin changes the fact that we have a small market with limited opportunities. I don’t believe that this means that some won’t make it, nor do I believe that it would be impossible to build a blog today and score the breakthrough we collectively need, but it is that much harder for us all. We’re better of respecting that the tyranny of numbers works against us, and being more creative in response.

In Web 2.0
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Hurricane Ike

admin —  September 13, 2008 — Leave a comment

While waiting for the obligatory “global warming is to blame” commentary, we’ve got the storm covered at The Inquisitr: Hurricane Ike Live.

In General
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Shhh, MP’s are pissheads + why we need bloggers

admin —  September 11, 2008 — 5 Comments

New South Wales is the political gift state that keeps on giving, this time with the newly sworn in Police Minister (3 days into the job) being forced to resign for dancing semi-naked in (the NSW) Parliament House and simulating a sex act on a female MP. Just for an extra touch of class, Matt Brown is said to have yelled out to the daughter of the MP he was on top of “Look at this, I’m titty f&^king your mother.”

Let’s just say I’ve seen worse from elected representatives 🙂

Here’s the little secret though you won’t read in the press: most MP’s are pissheads. Maybe not all, because you do get your occasional teetotaler who takes the job very seriously, or the god botherer who has decided that gods will doesn’t involve a $40 bottle of red, or if you’re in the ALP, a cartoon of beer. But a significant portion of them are, and probably a majority.

It could be the Australian culture of drinking on speed, a casual drink turning into more under the pressure cooker of politics. No matter what you may think of politicians, there is one given that should never be in dispute: they work extremely long hours, and rarely get a proper break. That they can kick back with some staffers or fellow MPs at the end of a day in their Parliamentary offices in Canberra, Melbourne, Perth or which ever state they are in may be their only escape.

Side note: in the last Federal Parliament, two WA Liberal MP’s owned vineyards. Mal Washer knows how to make a decent wine, Prosser’s wine was like vinegar, at least for the first two vintages. But I digress.

There is a serious drinking culture in politics, not just at the branch level. Parties such as the one that has surfaced today are legend among Canberra staffers in particular (I only did a few Canberra trips when I was working for Slippery Pete in the late 90s), although 99% of them will never surface in the press.

Let me tell you why these stories rarely surface: because it’s not uncommon for the journalists to be joining in the fun. If MP’s are pissheads, a good portion of the older members of the Australian press pack are permanently fortified. And lets face it, you don’t rat on your mates, do you?

Does anyone really believe that no one in the press knew of the Matt Brown story before today?

Talking of damaged brain cells, Mark Day has gone on an anti-blog rant in The Oz today. According to Day, journalism can only be practiced by journalists working for private companies that are profitable, because apparently blogs don’t make money and don’t employ journalists. Better still: all blogs are bad because (OMG) commenters on blogs can be nasty. Where do you start on that logic?

Better still, given the only news being created is from newspapers, it shouldn’t go online until later

Branded newspaper sites will hold an advantage over others, such as telcos and search engines, because they generate news. It makes sense to me that more newspapers will follow the lead of The Philadelphia Inquirer by reverting to a model where the news stories it breaks appear first in print. Why, if there is value attached to revealing these stories, should they be given away firston the net? They?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll find their way there soon enough.

And of course, the decline in newspaper circulations is our fault, not the fault on the newspapers themselves…

If not enough of us are willing to support the costly process of maintaining a vibrant, democracy-enhancing fourth estate, whose fault is that?

Let me answer that Mark: it’s your fault.

You can read any of the various other pieces I’ve written in relation to this debate, so I won’t repeat the arguments again now, but I will say this: the notion of heritage media being the last vestige of virtue in a sea of swill is complete and utter bollocks. The difference between a blogger and journalist is that a blogger knows he is biased, a journalist pretends that they’re not. Journalism in this country, particularly political coverage, has long since been the play thing of factions and power brokers, and we never see the full picture in a story. The drunk journalist filling his glass from the drunk MP is more compromised than 99% of all bloggers on the planet. We need bloggers to keep journalism honest, and to fill in the gaps where heritage media is regularly letting us down. We also need bloggers around so there’s someone to cover the news when the bulk of heritage media ceases to exist.

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