Razan Ghazzawi arrested in Syria

Prominent blogger Razan Ghazzawi is the latest victim of an increasingly desperate Syrian regime, arrested on her way to a media conference in Jordan on Sunday. The US-born human rights activist was arrested at the border while on her way to attend a workshop for advocates of press freedoms in the Arab world. Ghazzawi was arrested by police and immigration officials at the border while on her way to Amman to attend the conference as a media representative. While the Assad administration have said nothing, a local committee of activists confirmed the arrest yesterday.

The Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) said Ghazzawi worked for them as a media officer and was attending the workshop on their behalf. SCM said they condemned her arrest and the restrictions on civil society and freedom of expression in Syria. “SCM demands authorities stop abuse of systematic practice against bloggers, journalists, and Syrians citizens,” they said. “SCM demands to release the blogger Razan Ghazzawi immediately and unconditionally and to release all detainees in Syria and stresses on the need for Syrian authorities to respect their international commitments that have committed themselves to it through the ratification of the conventions and treaties international.” SCM said they held Syrian authorities responsible for any physical or psychological harm caused to her.

Ghazzawi has been a high profile documenter of violations and arrests in Syria since the start of the uprising in March. Bravely she was one of the few in Syria to blog under her real name. Her most recent post on 1 December announced another Syrian blogger and activist Hussein Ghrer had been freed after 37 days in Adra prison. “Hussein is going to be home tonight, where he will be holding his wife tight, and never let go of his two precious sons again,” Ghazzawi wrote. “It’s all going to be alright, and it will all be over very soon.” But now the nightmare has begun for Ghazzawi herself.

The arrest has sparked wide protests online. A Twitter campaign #freerazan has gone viral in the last 24 hours while own twitter feed @redrazan is being managed by friends. A Facebook page has also been set up since the arrest. A Moroccan blogging friend Hisham Almiraat said Razan was an indefatigable campaigner for human rights and freedom of expression in her country. “She has been advocating for the rights of political prisoners and minorities in Syria and has always fought for the rights of the Palestinians,” Almiraat said. “Razan is the most driven, thoughtful and freedom loving person I have ever met.”

A message on Ghazzawi’s blog shows what she told friends before she set off for Jordan. If anything happens to me, she said, “know that the regime does not fear those imprisoned but those who do not forget them”. This message suggests she knew she was taking a risk by travelling to the conference. The blog MidEast Youth is making much of her US citizenship in its calls for her freedom. While Ghazzawi admits she born in the US she never lived there. Her family lived for 10 years in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and are now back in Damascus. She graduated with a degree in English literature from Damascus University and did a further five years of study in Lebanon before returning home.

The administration she berated shows no sign of bending to intense international pressure either to release her or end atrocities against protesters. Instead the regime held bellicose war manoeuvres over the weekend. State-run television said the exercise was meant to test "the capabilities and the readiness of missile systems to respond to any possible aggression." The drill showed Syrian missiles and troops "ready to defend the nation and deter anyone who dares to endanger its security". Assad and his regime intend to tough this out with the support of Russia and China and won’t mind the collateral damage to the likes of Ghazzawi in the process.

The slow lingering death of journalism

Not everyone seems impressed, but in my view Lindsay Tanner raised substantive points in his interview with Leigh Sales this week in the 7.30 Report (sorry but I hate the almost invisible new title of the show). Tanner was arguing from his new book Sideshow where he says the media are largely to blame for the shoddy state of our polity. The argument was never fully teased out. The interviewer took the adversarial role of blaming the politicians for the problem and so the central issue of media behaviour was ignored.

Never did Sales address the problems Tanner was there to talk about: “gotcha journalism”, the treatment of gaffes, the trivialisation of politics as a game, and the glorification of the aggrieved whenever reform is proposed. Not once did Sales, an interviewer I respect and admire, accept the blame on behalf of the media and push on from there. Instead she took the easy line, pushing back on the duty of the politician to rise above the shackles the media has imposed. As Kerryn Goldsworthy pointed out, it was a textbook example of the problem Tanner was describing.

Sales kept asking why politicians couldn’t rise above it, but never once explored the other half of the problem, or even acknowledge it existed. It is as if the commodification of news is a taboo topic, which is somewhat understandable. After all, what media will admit to its audience the inconvenient fact they are part of the problem they are analysing?

Certainly none of the media organisations that spent millions of dollars giddily covering Friday’s Royal Wedding would make any such admission. As Dan Rather pointed out, we should remember this next time a media company closes a bureau or is unable to cover a “foreign story with full force”. This week-long extravaganza saw hundreds of journalists stationed in Green Park with nothing better to do than seek mind-numbing excreta on the edges of the wedding. For instance, the one snippet I caught of Channel 7’s Sunrise on Wednesday morning featured an in depth article on Kate Middleton’s stripper cousin or to use the parlance beloved of media pretending not to be prudish while being prurient, Middleton’s “saucy cousin”.

I don’t blame the journalists involved. Short of taking News of the World tactics and hacking the Royals’ phone service, they are not going to get an exclusive royal story outside the long lens. So they’re hard working hacks who devote their talents to a Kevin Bacon game to find news in saucy strippers two irrelevant stages removed from something that struggles to be important in the first place. The only newsworthy elements of the Royal Wedding are the fuss over the Bahraini ambassador, the snub to Blair and Brown, and the censoring of the Chaser’s attempt to satirise the wedding. Tanner’s Sideshow has moved into the centre stage.

The problem is, as Robert McChesney puts it, media companies are a government sanctioned oligopoly, owned by a few highly profitable corporate entities. They guard their privilege through legislative influence and through control of news coverage; they distort understanding of media issues. According to Eric Beecher it is a convergence of economic, technological and societal trends which is threatening “quality media” in an unprecedented way. He blames a media obsession with celebrity, fame, trivia and lifestyles as serious analysis cannot attract a broad constituency “without large dollops of celebrity gossip and soft lifestyle coverage.”

The Royal Wedding is easy news - controllable, glamorous and unthreatening to the journalists covering it. None of them are taking chances like Mohammad Nabous or Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros. Their deaths show courageous journalism still happens. These men died trying to understand things people don’t want you to know. But as Lindsay Tanner points out, the companies they work for don’t want you to know either. The model is borked. Investigative and analytical journalism do not pay their way any more. With the likes of the ABC too entrenched in the status quo, only the unpaid fifth estate is showing any interest in saving democracy. But without the power and kudos of the fourth, I don't fancy their chances.

Grog rations

After reading some of Grog’s Gamut’s first posts since The Australian journalist James Massola revealed his name, I was struck by the quality of the personal detail which informed his arguments. While it was always there to some degree, it seemed Grog suddenly had more freedom to back up opinions with detailed events from his life. As a result, I tweeted last night “Reading @grogsgamut's blog with added personal experiences makes me think @jamesmassola may have actually done us all a favour.”

Grog, who has also returned to twitter, replied to me promptly: “@derekbarry they were always there - you just didn't know my name.”

I didn’t dispute either of these points. But given the way his story was "always there" I was far from surprised the pseudonymous blogger was outed when it happened. Grog’s recent rise to prominence allied to the hints about his life in his work, made me sure sooner or later his identity would be revealed. He also tempted fate by trusting Massola not to reveal something he told him months ago. And surely he knew the writing was on the wall when he appeared at Canberra Media140 in September as embedded blogger “Greg”.

I was out of the country at the time so I missed that conference and I also missed much of the heat of the Twitter firestorm generated by “#groggate”. While it was good to see social media flex its muscles against the arrogance of older players, I thought it was amusing how enthusiastically they used the journalism cliché of “-gate”.

Yet I was still angry when I heard the Australian had outed him for no apparent reason. I foresaw the likely consequences of the article - his employers would force him to cease blogging and Australia would lose a useful critical voice. Though I’d never heard of the name of “Greg Jericho”, I’ve known about the blogger called “Grog’s Gamut” for some time. His bio was of a Canberra public servant who admitted he looked nothing like his Ralph Fiennes icon. Yet this unknown part-time writer was fast becoming one of the sharpest political writers in Australia. He excelled himself in his daily coverage of the 2010 election coverage. His 31 July tour de force “bring the journalists home” article attacking poor journalistic practices caused an ABC review and put him in the wider news. But it was the Murdoch empire that was Grog’s real target and it was only a matter of time before they would launch a counterattack.

Grog said he told Massola his name ten months ago, but it wasn’t until 27 September that he was “unmasked”. Massola's article and that of his boss Geoff Elliot who defended him became notorious in the Twittersphere and a matter of much derision. While some of the criticism was over the top, neither journalist can have much complaint. They failed the basic test of newsworthiness, completely botching the justification for the outing, because there was none.

Massola’s first sentence, which should be the most important, revealed nothing new. “The anonymous blogger who prompted Mark Scott to redirect the ABC's federal election coverage is a Canberra public servant,” he wrote. It served only as a false rationale for the name in the second sentence: “Greg Jericho, a public servant who spends his days working in the film section of the former Department of Environment, Heritage, Water and the Arts.” Massola passed the blame to twitter speculation for the revelation and then attempted to justify it by saying Grog’s bias might impact the “impartial and professional” way the APS is run.

The unmasking did not sit well with the Twitterati (not least with Grog himself). They blasted Massola for his abuse of privilege, false emphasis, lack of principles and lack of care of the consequences of his actions. Massola had violated a social norm and The Australian's Media section editor Geoff Elliott was forced to come out and defend him. Elliot only succeeded in making matters worse with his pompous tone. “If you are influencing the public debate, particularly as a public servant, it is the public's right to know who you are,” he said. “It is the media's duty to report it.”

Elliot never made it clear why the public had such a right nor why it was his job to inform the public about that right, particularly when that paper has a long history of pseudonymous publication. It is not difficult to read between these few terse lines of an experienced news curator to see News Ltd’s purely political line at work aimed at destabilising a potentially dangerous enemy in a manner that was borderline unethical.

Fortunately the Australian Public Service proved Elliot and me both wrong. After a couple of weeks of silence, Grog was back online this week. He may not “deserve anonymity” that Elliot summarily stripped him of but he certainly deserved to have a voice. His employers took into account he steered well clear of his own policy area in his writing. They took the sensible position no one of reasonable mind could confuse Grog’s views with those of his employers.

Reading the newest Grog/Greg musings shows he remains fiercely partisan. His opinions haven’t changed but I detected a greater willingness to use life experiences as collateral because now he could do so without fear of consequence. Though Grog has denied this, it was this new explanatory power I sensed which made me think Massola had, quite unintentionally, done us all a favour.

Gamut's Gambit: Blogging the failures of journalism

An extraordinary thing happened in the reporting of this year’s Australian Federal election. A blogger's shot across the bows of journalists hit its mark. The anonymous Canberran blog Grog’s Gamut was responsible for drawing blood with his post on Friday 30 July about media waste and mismanagement. Many others have written about the shallowness of media election coverage, but Grog struck the biggest chord yet when he said 95 percent of the journalists following Gillard and Abbott around the country were not doing their job properly and should come home. He backed up his comments with a personal story that rung deeply true.

Grog's post was important reading. But in the past such criticism would have been buried in the wastelands of cyberspace. What made this one different was the power of Twitter, where so many journalists keep their alter egos. Instead of killing blogging as many predicted, social media has instead “deepened it, [and] given it more clarity and heft”. At the time of writing, Grog’s post has been re-tweeted 266 times with many influential people including ABC boss Mark Scott, Lateline host Leigh Sales, The Chaser’s Chas Liacciardello and The Australian’s media writer Amanda Meade chiming in. As a result Grog caused journalists the most severe bout of introspection seen in this country since blogging took off in the early 2000s.

As James Massola wrote in the Australian on the weekend, not all journalists (including his own dismissive headline writer) liked the criticism. Herald Sun political reporter Ben Packham took issue with some of the assertions contained in the piece, as did the Sun-Herald's Jessica Wright. “Across Twitter a conversation bubbled and crackled as journalists and readers debated the merits of reportage from the campaign trail,” Massola wrote. “Such a public conversation about journalism was unimaginable five years ago.”

Indeed it was only three years ago in the last federal election campaign, that Massola’s bosses at The Australian penned the most infamous denunciation of bloggers this country has seen. The editorial of 12 July 2007 righteously thundered about “the self appointed experts online...from the extreme Left, populated as many sites are by sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper.” At the time, The Australian was defending its interpretation of opinion polls which were coming under increasing attack by knowledgeable bloggers such as Possum’s Pollytics, The Poll Bludger, and Mumble.

Three years later all three of those bloggers have been co-opted into the mainstream (the first two at Crikey, the third at The Australian). Corporate media has bigger issues to worry about than bloggers, plagued as it is by falling circulations, declining ad revenues and the trivialisation of online news. Those journalists who follow politicians around the country are in all likelihood overworked and underpaid. In responses to Grog’s post (though neither acknowledged him) the ABC's Annabel Crabb and News Ltd's Sally Jackson defended the press pack. They said the problem was caused by secretive politicians, fast-moving campaigns, 16 hour days and the lack of time to absorb important decisions. Neither put it down to any failings by the journalists themselves.

Scott Rosenberg, writer of the best book yet on blogging (“Say Everything”), suggests journalists are incapable of handling public criticism. He quotes recent US examples of reporters both snapping and sneering when attacked. He points to a common complaint journalists don’t like being held to the standards of accountability they expect from other office bearers. Rosenberg puts it down to the profession’s “pathological heritage of self-abnegation”. When something goes wrong with the system, they count on the edifice they are a part of to protect them.

By contrast bloggers have never been beholden to a bigger system and therefore find it easier to accept complaint. They are used to relying on crowdsourcing to make up for the lack of an editor. Rosenberg says this accepting attitude is now more common in younger journalists who have a different relationship to their own work and the public. Most journalists are also now getting used to the idea of reading blogs or better still running one themselves, changing attitudes towards the medium and those who write in it. The “running, linked blog” was one of Guardian editor’s Alan Rusberger’s ideas for how journalism might reinvent itself as it faces up to 21st century uncertainties.

But there are few Rusbergers in Australia. Most editors here are still wedded to old ways and remain a critical stumbling block to any reform of media reporting. It is important to remember Grog’s post was not addressed to journalists at all. His first sentence read: “Here’s a note to all the news directors around the country: Do you want to save some money?” Among the many incisive comments (which is another wonderful thing about blogs - their ability to generate excellent user generated content) the post got was from an anonymous member of the travelling press gallery. “There is no time to eat, to find a bottle of water, to go to the toilet,” the commenter wrote. “Just a relentless demand for more and more copy, faster and faster.”

Writing in Crikey on Monday, Margaret Simons said we perhaps had to have some sympathy for the journalists actually on the campaign trail who rarely have time to think. Simons said editors are not exercising enough independent judgement about what is worth reading and the stories (such as the weekend’s Latham debacle) descend in to solipsistic nonsense. “For goodness sake, get the reporters off the bus!” Simons wrote, exasperated. “Refuse to let your staff be treated with such contempt. Tell them they should not let it happen.” She then suggested the people formerly known as the audience solve the problem themselves. Taking her cue from Wikileaks' success, she asked “Could there be an election wiki, perhaps, giving the policy information the media is largely failing to provide?”
Over to us.

Pew finds the young are deserting blogging for social media

A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project has found blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults since 2006. The findings suggest that as blogging has matured as a practice, so has its practitioners. The survey was conducted as one of a series of reports undertaken by the Pew Research Center to highlight the attitudes and behaviours of American adults ages 18 to 29. The report brought together recent findings about internet and social media use among young adults and situated it within comparable data for adolescents and adults older than 30. Pew surveyed 800 adolescents and 2,253 adults in 2009 to get their data. (photo:eurleif)

The report found the Internet is a crucial “central and indispensable element” of the lives of American teenagers and young adults. 93 percent of teens between the ages of 12 and 17 went online, a number that has remained stable for three years. Nearly two-thirds of teen internet users go online every day. Families with teenage children are also most like to have a broadband connection (76 percent and up 5 points since 2006). It will probably surprise no one that the older you get, the less likely you are to be connected to the net. 74 percent of adults use the internet. But that number is skewed because younger adults (18-29) go online at a rate equal to that of teens (at 93 percent).81 percent of adults aged 30-49 are online while just 38 percent (but still rising) of those over 65 are hooked up.

Use of gadgets is on the rise as the Internet increasingly moves away from the desktop and onto mobile and wireless platforms. But again the growth is skewed towards the young. In September 2009, Pew asked adults about seven gadgets: (however they listed just six: mobile phones, laptops and desktops, mp3 players, gaming devices and ebook readers). On average, adults owned just under three gadgets. Young adults of age 18-29 averaged nearly 4 gadgets while adults ages 30 to 64 average 3 gadgets. But adults 65 and older on average owned roughly 1.5 gadgets out of the 7.

While the desktop or laptop remains the dominant way of getting online, newer ways of connecting are making headway. More than a quarter of teen mobile phone users use their cell phone to go online. A similar number of teens with a game console (PS3, Xbox or Wii) use it to go online. One in five owners of portable gaming devices uses it for Internet access. Perhaps surprisingly white adults are less likely than African Americans and Hispanics to use the internet wirelessly. African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet, and their use is growing at a faster pace than mobile internet use among whites or Hispanics.

Less of a surprise is the fact that teens are avid users of social networks. Three quarters of online American teens ages 12 to 17 used an online social network website, a statistic that has been growing at 7 percent each year since 2006. Teenagers are also more likely to use it as they get older. While more than 4 in 5 online teens ages 14-17 use online social networks, just a bit more than half of online teens ages 12-13 say they use the sites. Pew says this may be due to age restrictions on social networking sites that request that 12 year olds refrain from registering or posting profiles, but do not actively prevent it. The other notable statistic is that differences in gender are evening out ending the previous dominance of girls on social networks.

Usage of social networks stays constant in the 18-29 age group but then drops off rapidly for those over 40. Adults are also more likely to have profiles on multiple sites. Among adult profile owners, Facebook is currently the social network of choice; 73 percent of adults now maintain a profile on Facebook, 48 percent are on MySpace and 14 percent use LinkedIn. Analysis by education and household income show that support for Facebook and LinkedIn rises with both factors validating Danah Boyd’s research into the subject.

The news is not so good for Twitter. Pew’s September 2009 data suggest teens do not use the microblogging platform in large numbers. While one in five adult internet users ages 18 and older use Twitter or update their status online, teen data collected at a similar time show that only 8 percent of online American teens ages 12-17 use Twitter. Pew did add a rider to say the question for teens was worded quite differently from how the question was posed to adults so the results are not strictly comparable. With adults there was a sliding scale of Twitter usage with age. 37 percent of online 18-24 year olds use the platform compared to just 4 percent of over 65s.

But while use of all other web2.0 platforms was on the rise among the young, the striking exception was blogging. Teenage blogging has dropped from 28 percent to 14 percent of all users in the last three years. The decline spreads to commenting on other blogs. 52 percent of social network-using teens report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from 76 percent commenting in 2006. Young adults show a similar decline. However blog as a whole had not declined as there has been a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults. The hard work involved in blogging is increasingly becoming an old person’s game.

Fatma Riahi on frontline of Tunisia's war on bloggers and journalists

Blogger Fatma Arabicca has resumed blogging two months after authorities arrested her but the blog remains censored. Fatma joins another high profile Tunisian blogger journalist Sofiene Chourabi on the censorship list in recent times. Fatma’s original blog was deleted in November just before she attracted the unwelcome notice of authorities but a new version (in Arabic) has been posting since 17 January.

Arabicca is the nom de blog of college theatre professor, Fatma Riahi. On 2 November, the 34-year-old Riahi was summoned to appear before a Tunis criminal court where she was questioned about her online activities. The authorities wanted to know whether Riahi was hiding behind the pen-name of Blog de Z, a Tunisian cartoonist blogger whose political satire enraged the government. They released her and summoned her again the next day. Three security officers escorted her to her house in Monastir 160 km from Tunis, to confiscate her PC and conduct a search for evidence. A day later, they escorted her again to Monastir to get her passwords and access her facebook account.

Riahi was detained for a week and denied permission to speak to her lawyer for longing than a few minutes. She was charged with criminal libel that potentially carries a prison term to up to three years in prison. A Free Arabicca campaign blog was been launched by fellow Tunisian bloggers in support for Fatma (though it hasn’t posted since mid November), and there is also a Facebook support page.

While it is not clear what Riahi’s perceived offence was, it didn’t need to be much to rile the sensitive Tunisian government. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's government is one of the most repressive in the world as regards Internet usage. Social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook are often blocked because of content criticising the president's policies and the government also filters emails of human rights activists. The 2008 Reporters Without Borders freedom of the press index ranked Tunisia 143rd out of 173 countries. When the Journaliste Tunisien blog posted the index a day after it was issued, it was blocked by authorities.

Just last week the Committee to Protect Journalists reported an appeals court in Nabeul refused to release Tunisian journalist Zuhair Makhlouf despite his completion of a three-month prison term imposed in October. Makhlouf is a contributor to news Web site Assabil Online and the opposition weekly Al-Mawkif. He was sentenced in October on the charge of “harming and disturbing others through the public communication network.” The sentence ended on January 18 but Tunisian penal code provisions say a prisoner cannot be released before all appeals have been considered. The court designated February 3 as the date for Makhlouf’s initial appeals hearing.

The decision came days before an appeal hearing for Taoufik Ben Brik, a journalist sentenced to six months in prison. Last year Reporters Without Borders (RSF) criticised the detention of Ben Brik and a violent attack on another journalist. In October 2009 Ben Brik was detained on a trumped-up charge of harassing a woman on the street. Reporters Without Borders said the arrest was an effort to muzzle him for his fierce criticism of President Ben Ali. Around the same time, independent journalist Slim Boukhdhir was attacked by a group of men just hours after he gave a critical interview to the BBC. RSF said the behaviour was “befitting of a mafia regime."

The regime is showing no signs of changing its hostile attitude to journalists. Ben Ali has ruled Tunisia since taking over in a bloodless coup in 1987. In 2009 Ben Ali was re-elected for a fifth term with 89 percent of the vote in a rigged election. Although he promised to promote media diversity in 2004, the regime retains a tight control of news and information. According to the RSF, journalists and human rights activists are the target of bureaucratic harassment, police violence and constant surveillance by the intelligence services. The Internet is strictly controlled and foreign journalists are not allowed anywhere without the presence of government officials. But despite a total lack of regard for democratic institutions, RSF says Ben Ali is treated very leniently by international organisation all because he is “an ally of the west in its fight against terrorism.” No one seems to care about the terrorism he inflicts on his own subjects.

Blogging in the Noughties

The end of the year brings to an end an extraordinary decade for social media on the Internet. Google has turned itself into a verb, Youtube has become a video-sharing phenomenon, Facebook has transformed the way people talk to their friends while Twitter has established itself as the premier destination for finding out what is happening in the world right now. All have been crucial in democratising the Internet. Yet none of them have had the same effect on democracy itself as much as technology that predated the decade. That technology is blogging, which seems almost old hat as the Noughties draw to a close.

Yet blogging has not disappeared. On the contrary, blogging is a mature technology that is in rude health on an international scale. In 2006 the Pew Internet & American life project estimated that 12 million adult Americans kept blogs and 57 million adult Americans read them. Five million blogs globally posted content in June 2008 in 66 countries across 20 languages. 59 percent of these are maintained by people who have been blogging for 2 years or more. Scott Rosenberg says that the “blogosphere” is so large and anarchic, it does not exist in the singular. There were many blogospheres. “The one you saw depended on which little slice of the blog universe you were following.”

Blogs are interactive, contain posts of varying lengths in reverse chronological order, usually contain hyperlinks, allow comments, and have a blogroll of other blogs. But there is no single accepted definition of a blog. The academic Scott Wright said “It is generally accepted that a blog is a regularly updated website with information presented in reverse chronological order. But what do we understand by the term regular? I have recently updated a blog having failed to do so for several months. In the intervening period, was it a blog, a defunct blog, or a website?” Others have argued that a blog must contain a blog-roll or links section, yet several apparently highly active blogs do not have blog-rolls.

The technology advances of the later 1990s made mass communications possible in a way impossible in any previous era. In Dec 1997 Usenet user Jorn Barger coined the term weblog on his site robotwisdom.com to define his site which he saw as both a log of, and on the web. Barger’s site contained posts and hyperlinks but had no comments or other interaction. In early 1999 Internet analyst Peter Merholz announced he was pronouncing the word we-blog or “blog” for short and said he liked the new name’s crudeness and dissonance. “I like that it [blog] is roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking”.

Information upchucking became a lot easier with new blogging tools such as Google Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type in the early 2000s. No longer, as A.J. Liebling suggested, did the freedom of the press belong exclusively to those who own one. Blogs evolved from being listings of websites people liked to increasingly take the form of personal journals sharing thoughts and encourage others to take part in conversation.

Blogs have changed our politics and our world. Their hyperlinking structure created a nonlinear activity and an almost instantaneous feedback loop. These hotlinks are the key to the success of the blogs. Stephen Coleman called blogs the listening posts of modern democracy. According to David Perlmutter, the advent of blogging allowed people to bypass regular big media and create mass communications messages without formal training, in the process reaching large audiences, inviting others to co-author knowledge and producing a range of effects on public opinion, political affairs and government policymaking.

The word blog first appeared in a mainstream publication on 11 October 1999. The New Statesman described it as a “web page, something like a public commonplace book, which is added to each day…if there is any log they resemble, it is the captain’s log on a voyage of discovery”.

A couple of months later the word appeared in a newspaper in Ottawa Citizen article about pop singer Sarah McLachlan. Television took another six months to cotton on. And even then it was a typical TV take-down. CNNdotCom’s show of 8 July 2000 introduced its nerdword of the day thus: “Today’s training in technobabble: “blog”. No it’s not the way feel in the morning after drinking too much tequila the night before. And no its not one of the creatures found in Dr Seuss’s zoo”.

But blogs were quickly escaping the zoo and entering the mainstream. Blogs were an ideal outlet to express the trauma caused by 9/11. At a 2002 Harvard conference on Internet communication Professor Jay Rosen of New York University identified “a new kind of public, where every reader can be a writer and people do not so much consume the news as they ‘use’ it in active search for what’s going on sometimes in collaboration with each other, or in support of the pros.” This was the germ of Rosen’s later oft-quoted idea of the “people formerly known as the audience”.

But not everyone was convinced the former audience was up to the job. Writing around the same time as Rosen, Washington Post editors Len Downie and Robert Kaiser’s critique of journalism decried the degeneration of political reporting and investigative journalism and blogs were no help either. “There is little [in blogs] of what journalists would call reporting (our study this year found 5%)” they wrote.

While the majority 95 percent ran the gamut from purely personal journals to opinions that could not make it into big media, the five percent that reported were starting to make inroads. The power of American bloggers was shown in the Trent Lott and Dan Rather cases. Lott was a key congressional ally of George W. Bush but the president was obliged to denounce him after the blogs ran hard on his Strom Thurmond 100th birthday speech. In “Rathergate” the blogs forced CBS to apologise for the fact it could not prove its documents were authentic and Rather himself retired.

In the UK, blogger Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) is a one-man wrecking ball with a string of political scalps. Salam Pax’s online diary captured the frightening reality of invasion in Baghdad during the Iraqi war that disputed official accounts of the conduct of the 2003 war. Elsewhere in Asia, successful Korean OhMyNews’s motto is “every citizen is a reporter" while online citizen journalism outfit Malaysiakini has evolved into Malaysia’s premier news site.

Here in Australia there have been no “gotcha” moments among the blogs yet but they are proving successful if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Mainstream media have been busy copying the blogs while still professing to damn them – who could forget The Australian’s 2007 castigation of “sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper”?. But by 2009 News Ltd had started up The Punch, while Fairfax reheated the National Times masthead and the ABC has begun The Drum. The Drum’s editor Jonathan Green was hired from Crikey where he was responsible for starting up an influential network of bloggers to complement its journalism.

Asking whether blogging is journalism is like asking whether TV is journalism: it all depends on what’s on. The two practices should and do co-exist - often under the same name. Nevertheless the transformation from journalist to blogger isn’t always smooth. The Guardian’s groundbreaking Comment is Free website struggles to deal with the hoi polloi. As contributor and political journalist Jackie Ashley puts it, “there will always be those who know much more about a subject than a columnist. And equally there will be those who think they know much more. I’m delighted to hear from both: just so long as you make proper arguments and don’t call me a fucking stupid cow.”

The ease of anonymous publishing in an online environment has turned it into a space where it is all too easy to diagnose stupidity. Rumours, hoaxes and cheating games circulate which risk the public sphere descending into a chaos and anarchy. But as Henry Jenkins notes this is not an inevitable outcome, “As the digital revolution enters a new phase, one based on diminished expectations and dwindling corporate investment,” he says, “grassroots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence”. That moment has arrived.

Cleanskins: A dose of Roma Therapy

I learned a new term today at work. Sue from Advertising told me I had four cleanskins to work with for next Tuesday’s paper. I looked blankly at her. Cleanskins? Was this something political or was I being offered wine or chicken, I thought. No, Sue patiently explained, it meant I had four full pages without ads to do what I liked with. Cleanskins were an old trade term I’d simply never come across in my short experience. Yet it made perfect sense as soon as it was explained to me.

There have been many moments like that as I deal with the new realities of life as a journalist.

The biggest of these realities is the deadline. Much of my time in Roma has been spent dealing with it. It is constantly at the back of my mind and it is adrenalin-fueling as it approaches. This feeling comes twice a week in Roma as The Western Star is issued on a Tuesday and a Friday.

My Roma is the one in Western Queensland not in Italy. It was named for Lady Diamantina Roma who married George Bowen, Queensland’s first Governor-General. I wished they named the town Diamantina. Though geography doesn’t matter too much on the Internet, it’s a real pain sharing the name of your town with a major world capital. Though most of the conversation is in Italian, there is plenty of English conversation is about the football team called Roma or the Eastern European gypsies that Hitler loathed as much as the Jews.

My Roma is a small town 480km west of Brisbane in the centre of a district called the Maranoa. I’ve been here three weeks and I arrived slapbang in the middle of summer heat. Already I can tell the difference between 38 degrees and 42 and am beginning to feel that 30 is downright chilly. Yet I’m finding its dry heat more manageable than the suffocating sticky Brisbane equivalent in summer.

But airconditing is proving a must. Aircon is on the faultline of my political principles. The Green in me is annoyed by its flagrant waste of resources but the leftie praises the fact that I'm made comfortable by such wonderful cheap technology. I’m now searching for a conservative side that will make serious money out of aircon made from renewable sources.

In the meantime I’m earning a crust as a journalist. After four years of political blogging, I thought working for a masthead would provide me with good experience and a grounding in the daily realities of industrial journalism.

I must do a disclosure at this point. Starting at the newspaper has presented me with a problem about what to say about it in a blog. I’m bound by rules I’ve happily signed up with my employer not to compete against the paper. There are also issues of confidentially and conflict of interest. I like my job here in Roma and people I work with and don’t want to say anything here that would jeopardise it. The views here are mine and not associated with APN Media.

But being here has made me see some clear differences between the roles of blogger and journalist I wanted to talk about.

Firstly there is the power of the masthead. There are few bloggers around worldwide who have the power to ring people up and ask for quotes with a reasonable certainty they will be taken seriously. But every local masthead has this power and respect.

If they are not always treated a straight answer, then at least they usually get the courtesy of a carefully constructed response which you can often query further if need be.

Also you are much more likely to elicit a response from a member of the general public when you identify yourself as a representative of a trusted brand. This means that as a journalist you will have access to a lot of information. It is a powerful tool that needs careful management to avoid being abused.

For all its faults, I’m finding regional newspaper journalism is still trusted and unlikely to go extinct anytime soon. People engage with local papers because they still fulfill a strong social function.

They also hold up a sizable mirror to local events unmatched by any other media. Radio has the immediacy and bonhomie of local characters, but there is little local journalism. TV is even more openly piped in from remote places. The Internet is either underdeveloped or untrusted or both. In towns like Roma, that leaves papers with a duty to provide citizens with information they need to make sense of a plethora of local events. It is a clearing house of gossip, a fount of news, a big notice board for the community and a window on events elsewhere in the world.

But it is also a commercial entity and I’ve come to see newspaper ads as my friends. Apart from paying my wages, they also fill crucial space that suddenly makes filling a 24 page newspaper less daunting and leaves me with less cleanskins to worry about.

That’s another difference between blogging and journalism. As a journalist I see 40 x 30 centimetre blank sheets of paper that have to be filled regularly where as the only pressure I had on me as a blogger was a self-imposed rule to blog daily or as near to daily as I could. Space is not an issue on the Internet, but lacking this design constraint doesn’t necessarily make it better.

It is this tyranny of the blank page that sets the creative rules of journalism. An Internet post can be one line long or a thousand but the newspaper is more or less the same size every time. The pressure to find stories is relentless and they exist wherever you find them. That means using phone calls, tips, emails, press releases, old issues, wider issues, softer issues. Papers abhor an information vacuum. The white space must be filled. If there is no ad on the space, then there simply has to be editorial content.

This is where photos come in. Picture not only tell a thousand words they can fill the space of a thousand words on the page. And people like seeing pictures of themselves and people they know in the paper.

Being a rural paper, I have to take most of my photos myself. I never ever envisaged myself as a photographer though Fernando Mereilles’ City of God is one of my favourite films. On most engagements I usually first have to deal with my terror of my poor photographic technique and the possibility I’ll ruin the photo. So to get over this, I’m slowly trying to act as a photographer, and make more demands of subjects. I'm also taking more photos in the hope that some will come out. There may even be some good ones in there, or least presentable after being tightened up with a crop.

Photography is therapeutic and redefining my idea of being resourceful but at this stage, I still prefer the written form ahead of photojournalism.

It is wonderfully invigorating to grapple with an issue I don’t understand and attempt to unravel it and re-present that for a wider audience. In this, the blog has been very useful training both in terms of research and of threading an argument together in competent layperson’s terms.

But a major difference of style is the use of the direct quote which is almost compulsory in industrial media but rare in blogs. Having one source is immeasurably better than none because it enlivens the piece and adds variety with an additional point of view. Stricter authorities such as the ABC demand there be at least two sources and I’ve seen arguments that three should be the minimum.

But getting so many people to talk on the record is not always easy, not even for a masthead. People are cagey or a response needs to be vetted by a media unit. And in a busy world, people are rarely on tap for a ready quote. As the deadline moves ever closer, experts quickly deteriorate from being people who have expertise in their chosen topic to being the person who actually returns your call.

The telephone is my friend. I didn’t use the telephone much as a blogger, I use it a lot as a journalist. It helps I don’t have to pay the bills for the call. I always feel a slight sense of nervous energy every time I dial a number. People don’t hide as much on the phone as they do in email.

The only thing better is real life meeting. I’m doing that a lot in Roma and enjoying it too. And I know that if I’m really serious about tackling those cleanskins, I’m going to have to wear out a lot of shoe-leather too.

Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging

I’m just back from a Sydney two-day Media140 “news in the age of social media” conference. Due to Internet access issues and the vagaries of battery life, I didn’t get the chance to blog about it in Sydney. The conference generated a lot of discussion and argument (particularly between journalists and “new media” advocates) and I’ll add my take over the next few days. However, I wanted to begin with a comparison that struck me.

It seemed to me that the battles that dominated the backchannels this week reminded me of similar warfare waged two years ago. In September 2007 I attended the first (and to my knowledge, still only,) Australian Blogging Conference in Brisbane. Much of that conference focused on blogs and political reportage. Bloggers and academics lined up on one side of the argument describing how blogs were a crucial part of the public sphere. On the other side professional journalists reminded them that blogging was a practice as well as a platform and their craft skills were still needed to provide proper context to whatever information being made public.

The journalists had good reasons for their turf minding – they feared their role as sense-makers was about to be seriously diminished. Though the GFC was then unheard of, the media industry was already in crisis by 2007. As more and more people abandoned traditional media in favour of more disparate (and sometimes desperate) news sources online, it was becoming increasingly harder to harvest eyeballs for advertisers in sufficient quantities to justify the news expense of big media. That day in Brisbane, the argument raged back and forth over whether blogs would save journalism or walk all over its corpse.

With two years hindsight, it is obvious that blogging will do neither. The platform will continue as a popular venue of long-form thoughts for produsers, some of whom will be professional, some others amateur and more may be a mix of the two. All will likely continue to irk each other. But as the technology has matured, so has the argument. As blogging evolved, much of the heat went out of the battle. While a few journalists remain hostile, most are now either bloggers themselves or else see the blogs less as a threat than part of their arsenal of sources.

That hasn’t meant the journalists’ problems have gone away. On the contrary, journalists are move than ever under threat from corporate shareholder pressure to cut costs and demand thinner news rooms. The blogs are still eating away at audience along the long tail. Now more tools under the rubbery banner of “social media” are further muddying the waters. But thanks to the link economy, blogs and the social networks possibly bring as much traffic to old news sites as they take away.

Of the social networks it is Twitter that is causing the most professional angst. Twitter was a toddler at the time of the 2007 blogging conference and barely merited a mention. But its real time news function would prove irresistible and the subsequent explosion of growth and influence has pushed it to the centre of the argument. Ande Gregson coined the concept of media140 to launch a global discussion on what news in the social age means. I enjoyed the conference and the diverse set of speakers but the name riffing off Twitter’s character limit meant that the impact of Facebook (now 325 million users) did not get the attention it deserves.

What did come out was the same battle between new and old media proponents. The early adopters and academics showed how Twitter was changing the news landscape. The journalists asserted their right to provide an ethical, informed and contextualised take on the news in the new platform.

I suspect the outcome will be similar to the 2007 arguments. The (former) audience will be atomised into dialogues of the deaf and there will be less control and mediation. But journalists will prosper if they engage with Twitter, and carefully curate the data while showing a human and ethical face. Twitter, like the blogs, or Facebook, won’t hasten the demise of traditional media. As the wonderful fake Twitter account @BigHarto (based on News Ltd boss John Hartigan) pointed out late Friday afternoon: "In closing, I'd just like to remind #media140 participants that the future of journalism is whatever I fucking say it is." This may just be art resembling postmodernism. But it is also a reminder that real media power will not be tossed away lightly.

Blogger, Twitter and the rise of Evan Williams

Last month Twitter co-founder Evan Williams took to the company blog to announce the microblogging platform had truly arrived as a major media presence. Williams told the world on 25 September the company had “closed a significant round of funding”. Williams went on to publicly thank the investment firms that were pouring an estimated $50 million into the company: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley (who ignored the July advice of a 15-year-old intern who said teens don’t use Twitter). Williams had reason to be happy with the cash influx – it meant investors now value the company at a billion dollars. (photo of Evan Williams by Tyler Howarth)

While Williams will have to share the rewards with fellow founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, it is still likely to leave him an extraordinarily wealthy man. However, it is unlikely however to mean retirement for the gifted 36-year-old. Twitter is the second great idea of one of social media’s pioneers – in the early Noughties he did as much for blogging as he is now doing for micro-blogging.

Williams’ progress is charted diligently in Scott Rosenberg’s evolutionary tale about blogging “Say Everything”. According to Rosenberg, Williams has been involved in entrepreneurial start-up companies all his adult life. He founded and folded two technology companies in his native mid-west that attempted to market CD-ROM guides.

Williams moved to California in 1997 to work for technology book publisher O’Reilly which he called “his first real job”. He left after six months and moved to San Francisco where he met fellow twenty-something geek Meg Hourihan. The pair shared a passion for web development and Williams’ coding skills were matched by Hourihan’s pragmatic head for business. They went into business in late 1998 starting a company called Pyra Labs which started out from Hourihan’s living room.

Pyra Lab’s cluetrain generation aim was to produce ambitious software for group production. They copied the philosophy of Hotmail and Yahoo who realised software tools work best within web browsers. In August 1999, Pyra unveiled a product called Blogger which was a free tool to automatically update a website. The tool was easy to use and would eventually transform blogging into an act of mass democracy.

But Williams and Hourihan had no idea that would happen back in August 1999. In their vision Blogger would be used solely by geeks who had previously coded their websites by hand. When Williams developed the prototype, he had an epiphany. As he later told Rosenberg, “the site changed from an occasional creative outlet that I would do when I had time, to much more of a linked outlet for my brain.” What Blogger had done was to clear obstacles from the path between brain and publication and it was not hard to see others might like this feeling.

Anyone was allowed to come to Blogger.com, sign up for free and use the product to host a blog. Initially it could only be used with person’s own website and domain name. It quickly became popular and by March 2000 the Pyra team was the toast of Austin’s SXSW tech conference. Rosenberg says William’s “off-centre charm” made him a poster-boy for the growing band of bloggers.

Blogger suffered the inevitable growing pains as user numbers lifted through Y2K. Williams and Hourihan attracted half a million dollars of seed capital to hire more programmers and stabilise the business just as the dotcom boom crashed. The company had no revenue but had plans to sell advertising and pro-pay plans with extra features. In September 2000, the company launched Blogspot, its own version of a web-hosted service which married perfectly with the products “one-box-and-one-button” interface. It would prove perfect for Internet novices.

But cash dried up after the dot-com crash. Williams and Hourihan fought increasingly often as their plight became more pronounced. When they got down to their last $60,000 they began forsaking pay and paying bills by credit card. Meanwhile Blogger’s growth was phenomenal. A user list of 2,300 at the start of 2000 had exploded into 100,000 12 months later. Blogger crashed many times as the creaking HP desktop computer used to host the data seized up. On 31 January 2001, Hourihan had enough of failures to attract more capital and quit the company.

Williams posted a message on his personal blog that day that said “and then there was one”. While Williams apologised to his staff for laying them off, he refused to fold Blogger. Fans offered to help and many donated time, money and services. Williams eked by on a meagre budget and the product kept attracting new users. Mid 2001 was his darkest hour. When 9/11 happened, the US (and the rest of the world) looked for forums to pour out their complex emotions. Blogger was a perfect fit and people flocked to the service to vent anger, as well as grieve, offer advice and share their fears.

As a result Blogger had 700,000 users by 2002 and its Pro Service was finally up and running. Williams was now looking at the next problem: how to scale up to a hundred million users. Former employer (and now investor) Tim O’Reilly introduced Williams to Google which had already turned itself into the world’s indispensible Internet search tool. Williams brainstormed ways they might work together but was unprepared for Google’s suggestion they buy the company outright.

At the time Google had no reputation as a buyer of companies but were cashed up and beginning to look at bright ideas across the web. It was obvious Blogger was a very bright idea indeed. The independent-minded Williams wasn’t immediately persuaded. Cash flow was good and he did not fancy becoming a company apparatchik again. But the Google share deal would prove too good to refuse. Following the 2004 Initial Public Offering Williams would have become a multi-millionaire. Despite the megabucks, what really sold Williams was Google could take Blogger to the next level. He sold up in February 2003.

He was taken on as Blogger’s “steward” and began the focus on turning Blogger mainstream. While newer more advanced technologies such as Movable Type and Wordpress attracted the geeks away, Blogger became the tool for web newcomers and Google integrated it with Picasa to allow bloggers upload photos with their posts. It grew from a million users at the time of takeover to one of the busiest websites in the world today with an Alexa ranking of seven.

Williams wasn’t prepared to hang around to watch Google take over the world. After the IPO, he traded in his stock and immediately began work on a new company using his handsome profit. His new tool would go back to basics and allow people to quickly share their blog updates but would be limited to 140 characters. Twitter was born and its early growth mirrored Blogger. This time round the future-proofed Williams could more easily ride out the rough patches. In 2007 he told a conference that starting with tight constraints can help new web businesses win users and grow fast. Rosenberg said Williams had seen that play out with Blogger at a scale few businesspeople ever get to experience. And now he has done it again with Twitter. Now that Morgan Stanley and co have effectively bought Twitter’s IPO, it surely won’t be too long before Williams gets itchy entrepreneurial feet again.

Trafigura throttles the Guardian but not the guardians of the Internet

The London based oil trader Trafigura bills itself as “one of the largest independent companies trading commodities today”. Whether it will still be as large in the coming months is open to question as its scurrilous attempts to do damage control by throttling the truth are coming completely unstuck. While Trafigura has admitted to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge African pollution damages claim, it is trying and failing to stop the world from finding out about its grubby activities. (photo of Houses of Parliament by Derek Barry)

In an extraordinary legal event, British broadsheet the Guardian was hit overnight with an injunction that prevents it from reporting on parliament – a right that has been guaranteed in British law since 1688 (*** see legal note below). But the Internet was not around in 1688 and the newly defined wider “media” is busy making an ass of the injunction.

The Guardian injunction sounds like it emerged from the pages of a Franz Kafka novel. The article was related to published Commons order papers containing a question to be answered by a minister later this week. But the injunction prevents the Guardian from “identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.” The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers “why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.” All the Guardian could say was that the case involves London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media on behalf of global corporations.

But while Carter-Ruck could shut down the Guardian they could not shut down the Internet. The Twitterverse went wild on speculation about the case, bringing it to a much larger audience than would otherwise have heard of the case in a wonderful example of the Streisand Effect. Meanwhile a simple Google search of “Carter Ruck Trafigura” took me to blogger Richard Wilson’s site. Wilson simply ignored the edict and linked to the parliamentary question.

The question is from Newcastle-under-Lyme Labour MP Paul Farrelly who wanted to ask the Secretary of State for Justice, “what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.”

According to Wikileaks the Minton report was a confidential report ordered by Trafigura into its toxic dumping practices in the Ivory Coast. A week after it was published, the Independent wrote an article “Toxic shame: Thousands injured in African city”. Mysteriously that article about Trafigura’s dumping of sludge in Abidjan has been pulled from the Independent’s website but the cached version is still available here.

Trafigura’s chemical operation used a cheap and dirty process called "caustic washing" that is outlawed in many countries. The company had claimed that the toxic waste they dumped in Abidjan was “routine and harmless”. But the Minton report showed the true nature of the problem. Thousands of Ivorians flocked to local hospitals in 2006 after coming in contact with hundreds of tons of highly toxic oil waste. At least 12 people died with fatal levels of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide, one of the waste's by-products. 31,000 others were injured. Many of these people are now involved in one of the world’s largest class actions.

What the whole shemozzle shows is that it is much harder to hide the truth with sharing tools like Twitter, Wikileaks, Google search, and Google Cache around. The quick and dirty actions of Trafigura and Carter-Ruck are reprehensible but probably par for the course in big business. But now they are facing the just deserts of their faulty cost-benefit analysis. The short term gain of their lies has been wiped away as the shabbiness of their actions is exposed. The lesson they are learning quickly is that the worst thing you can do is stop people from talking about you - It has exactly the opposite effect.

***Legal note: The Guardian’s breached right has been identified as “absolute privilege” which I believe is not entirely correct. I’m not a trained lawyer so my understanding may be wrong. However, according to my copy of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law (Australian but based on British precedents) “absolute privilege” is reserved for what is said inside parliament (and the courts) and what is reported in tabled documents there. But journalists can never claim absolute privilege against defamation unless they are giving evidence or it is their document. The defence that journalists are entitled to is called “fair report” which allows them to provide “balanced and accurate” coverage of parliamentary proceedings.

==UPDATE== A victory for the Internet. The injunction has been withdrawn barely two hours after I wrote about it.

Twitter and the norm police

This blog post is inspired by an online discussion I had with Julie Posetti, Jason Wilson and others today. A conversation that began about Posetti's question on how to deal with corrections in the online world evolved into a discussion about defamation on Twitter. It was Wilson’s contention that when we tweet we publish and we should therefore consider our words with great care before sending them out in the world. I agreed but didn’t see it as a huge problem. Wilson saw it as an issue of how to resolve tensions between online behaviour and community standards expressed in laws. He may be right. The growth in cases such as the Facebook Six shows that online life is increasingly affecting life away from the computer. (photo by Derek Barry)

The conversation with Wilson reminded me of remarks he made earlier this year in relation to Internet indiscretions in the Quadrant hoax affair. Wilson said that bloggers and commenters who discussed the identity of the hoaxer could have ruined the reputation of someone if they happened to be wrong in their very public opinions. At the time, he recommended a book called The Future of Reputation by a US legal scholar Daniel Solove which discusses some of the problems in this area. Tonight I finally got around reading the opening and last chapters of Solove’s book which is available as a free download.

The Future of Reputation is informed by issues at the boundary of privacy and free speech. The evangelists of the Internet would have it that free speech trumps everything. This is arguable perhaps in the US with its First Amendment provision but certainly not supported by the law of defamation in Australia. Here if you say something that damages a person’s reputation you better be able to prove what you are saying is true because the presumption of innocence does not apply to publications. If you write something down in a public context, then you are liable for your actions.

The Internet has the ability to enforce social attitudes of approval or disapprovals, or norms, as they can be called. The enforcers are the “norm police” who confront errant behaviour in order to keep the norm strong and effective. With a billion and a half online, there is as much a need to be as accountable for actions in cyberspace as there is in meatspace. But the ease in which moral outrage can spread across the Internet can create a mob-driven police state.

Because blogs have not been around for long there is a double danger. There is unprecedented power to spread messages compounding an underdeveloped set of norms to keep people in check. Journalists have ethical codes that act as restraints but bloggers generally do not. Google has replaced the private investigator as a way of finding out everything about people. Fragments of public data about us are strewn across the Internet (btw should anyone go Googling me, I am not to be confused with “Derrick Barry”, an American gentleman who is apparently the world’s best Britney Spears impersonator. I lack his singular talents).

The Internet is a cruel historian. The social practice of gossiping, spreading rumours and shaming have all moved to the Net. There they transform from “forgettable whispers” to the scarlet letter of permanent memory. But protecting people’s reputation may mean curtailing other people’s free speech. The law needs to take a wise middle path that does not chill speech but still prevents people from injuring others online. Social networks are a marvellous invention of creativity and connection but they redefine what is meant by private lives. We grapple with reputation, gossip, shame, privacy, norms and free speech and weave them into social tapestries of immense complexity.

Solove recommends lawsuits as a way of seeking redress if reputation is sullied but the law should encourage informal attempts at resolution. Privacy needs to be re-defined for its properties of accessibility, confidentiality and control. Free speech can be reconciled with privacy by allowing anonymous stories. But Internet authors should remove defamatory material if requested. Often this is all that is required; there is no additional financial impost.

There are downsides. Products like Reputation Defender act to “clean up” an online reputation but also could be used to whitewash inconvenient truths. According to Solove, the law is “a subtle instrument but not quite a violin”. It is puny compared to norms and these will largely determine how privacy will be protected in the digital world. As President Obama recently reminded American school students, individuals who write on blogs and Twitter and Facebook should always think about the impact of the words they use. Some day they may come back to haunt the person who wrote them.

Half way house

I’m currently half way through an 18 month master’s of journalism at QUT. I am actually slightly over the exact half-way mark as the mid-term break that arrives next week is strangely week 11 out of 14 (something very Irish about that!). Mine is a three semester course-work degree, so the end result will not be treated as highly as if it were a research masters. However a third of my work is thesis. That will be due in late May 2010 and I want that to be treated and examined as if it were a full research thesis. (pic: QUT Kelvin Grove "Education A Block Building" by Derek Barry)

Though I’ve yet to nail down a decent journalism-related research question for the thesis, I have chosen to broadly situate the study within blogs and their place in the world, But whatever the question will eventually be (and I’ll need to get that sorted by the end of this year) it makes sense to discuss it within the context of my own blogging. Reflective analysis means applying an honest blowtorch to my own work prior to making any grand statements about the wider world.

So this post is the first attempt to publicly verbalise the journey. I will be trying to do this on a weekly basis between now and June 2010 (though there might be a few weeks off between semesters). It will be as open and self-critical as I can make it. This won’t be easy - I made the decision to discuss blogs back in February and for reasons I cannot yet easily explain I’ve been dragging my heels on mentioning it in my own blog.

Or blogs plural. I currently spend several hours every day running three blogs (or two and a half to be more accurate). I maintain two versions of Woolly Days. The original started on Blogger in September 2005 and a new one started on Wordpress in February this year. The two are almost exactly alike in article content. My third site is Irish I’s which I started in June 2007 to post jokes, pics, and oddball stories I stumble upon on a daily basis. Irish I’s is also on blogger (though is possibly an ideal candidate to move to a newer platform such as Posterous).

But Woolly Days is my major preoccupation and I can often spend four to six hours a day putting to a post together. I am currently persisting with two versions of Woolly Days because I cannot decide which one to go one with. I like the more professional look of WordPress Woolly Days but I’m still fond of Blogger Woolly Days on the Google-owned platform that gave me a public voice four years ago. So I put up with double-entry bookkeeping (though typographical errors fixed up subsequently in one are not necessarily retrofitted to the other). If I were unsentimental I should be seriously considering leave the Woolly Days brand behind and start blogging under the label of Derek Barry or else at some other “Days”. This might well happen when I physically leave Wooloowin (where I’ve lived since 2004).

I don’t think it would greatly matter wherever I publish next because it is the blogging form that matters not the brand. It is as a blogger I think I am establishing an authentic, articulate and unorthodox voice that is slowly getting recognition in the wider community.

That pleases me because blogging is important. Don’t be deceived by the claims that it is so 2004. The fact that the early adopters have moved on means is that it is a maturing product with tens of millions of active exponents. These people blog because it gives them as a long-form and free platform of communication on the Internet. If democracy could be defined as the freedom to express your opinion widely, then the rise of the blog is a good thing. For me that means over a thousand articles and a million words over four years at a rate of six or more posts a week.

So is anyone listening to this widespread distribution of opinion, is anyone paying attention? Who is reading my million words?

To answer these questions, I need to analyse some audience metrics for my blogs.
After 20 days this month (approx 3 weeks), my sites have received the following number of hits (in brackets number of hits a day)
Woolly Days Blogger 32, 927 = average 1,646 hits a day
Irish I’s 1, 319 = average 66 hits a day
Woolly Days Wordpress 378 = average 19 hits a day.
For a grand total of 34, 624 at an average of 1,731 hits a day.

Hits aren’t humans and I don’t have breakdown of hits to visits on a monthly basis. However on a daily basis the number of visits averages between 65 and 90 percent of the hits total. If we go with the lowest figure of 65 percent that would mean an average total of 1,125 human visitors come to my blogs every day in September 2009. The actual figure that read my work is higher than that as Woolly Days blog content is also available to read in Facebook (to 94 people) and all are available as RSS feeds (to 42 subscribers on Google Reader and an unknown number on other RSS readers). But lets assume however this number is low and adds merely another 75 or so visitors, to give a nice round total number of 1,200.

This means I am talking to about twelve hundred people every day. But nowhere near this total are listening or indeed reading the same material. Far fewer still are actually talking back, but I might have to save the analysis on that for a later time. Because I wanted to concentrate on how people get to my site now. Why, when there are tens of millions of blogs to go to, do they come to mine?

90 percent of my traffic arrives serendipitously – well, its pleasantly surprising for me, anyway. But most of these people aren’t interested in Woolly Days at all. Four out of every five people come from Google Images (and increasingly Bing). They’ve clicked on the picture and may or may not stay to read the text in the lower pane. I’m reasonably high in a surprising number of Google image searches in my increasingly long tail. The most popular page at the moment on Woolly Days is a 2006 article on Magna Carta. For reasons entirely unknown to me, it is currently number in Google Images for that search.

I thank Google for their algorithms but it is the one in five that don’t come for the picture that are most likely to pay attention to the words. Half of these come from Google searches (10 percent of the entire total). These searchers usually do not hang around for long once they found an answer (or a lack of answer) to the question they have asked Google though occasionally are hooked in to explore a bit further.

The last 10 percent are people who come via bookmarks, links, Twitter, Facebook, RSS and other recommendations. It is these 120 or so people who come regularly to the site as part of their regular media consumption who are most likely to be reading what I’m currently writing. Given that most of the posts here at Woolly Days break the cardinal rule of short blogging and are often quite dense and political, it is likely that at least two thirds of these will not have the time or inclination to read this far into the post. Let’s assume then that there are just 40 readers left at this stage.

I humbly thank this mathematical derived forty that have stayed the course and hope that they find the rest of this journey interesting. I would also love to hear back what people think about blogging or what they think might be an interesting research question. I would like this quest to serve as much meaning as I can cram into it. But if it there is no meaning or if none of this matters, I’d like to hear about that too.

Next week I’ll be looking at how much journalism is in my work.

Cheers
Derek Barry

The last post and chorus

(picture adapted from original by Annie Mole).

What happens to a blog when it turns seven? Well, if it belongs to Lawrence Lessig it is retired. To be fair to the legal scholar Lessig, he doesn’t actually use the r-word. Instead he called it hibernation and a sabbatical but he did write it was “the last post in this frame”. Whatever he calls it, Lessig’s departure is the latest in a line of events that is giving the impression that blogging is passé.

Lessig named three reasons why he was cutting back. These were the impending birth of his third child, a new five-year directorship at Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard and the workload involved in maintaining a blog. He needed two friends’ admin help to cull the 10,000 spam comments that were causing pollution among the 20,000 genuine ones. Lessig said he was not abandoning web2.0. He was continuing presence at Twitter, Blip.tv and podcasting.

Here in Australia, Kate Carruthers picked up the theme today that newer social networks have made blogs look so 2004. While Carruthers accepted there was still a need for longer-form communication platforms, she suggested there may be a move away from the likes of Blogger and Wordpress. Carruthers said possible replacements include Tumblr and Posterous which are half-way houses between blogs and shorter messages. “They seem to sit between a short message sharing medium and a traditional blog,” she said. “They also easily incorporate multimedia content.”

Carruthers didn’t mention Lessig but did link to an article Paul Bautin wrote in Wired a year ago. Boutin’s friendly advice to anyone wanting to start a blog was “don’t”. He went further and suggested all current bloggers should also down tools. “Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago,” he argued. “The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.” He says blogging lacks the intimacy it used to have. And as well as dealing with spammers and trolls, Boutin says big media have taken over. The buzz was now at social multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook which “made publishing pics and video as easy as typing text”. His message condensed to 140 characters was: "@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?"

Boutin himself linked to another high profile blogger who had called it quits. Weblogs network owner Jason Calacanis also announced his retirement from blogging in 2008 despite professing to love the craft. Calacanis said blogging had gotten too big, too impersonal and too lacking in intimacy. But unlike Boudin, Calacanis was heading towards a more primitive form: a 600-750 member mail-list he was going to have a conversation with “I’m looking for something more acoustic, something more authentic and something more private,” he said.

Calacanis, like Lessig and Boudin, has good reasons to stop blogging. But are they indicative of a wider trend? It may be 12 months old, but Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 would beg to differ. Its data suggests that blogs are pervasive and part of our lives. 184 million people worldwide have started one and 346 million people read them. There are almost a million new posts every day written in 80 languages. Blogs are part of the daily traffic of 77 percent of active Internet users. Twice as many people go to a blog as those who visit Facebook. This seems like a practice in rude health, but Technorati does acknowledge one issue: the lines are continuing to blur as to what is a blog and what is not. It rightly says mainstream media sites packaging their content as “blogs”. But Technorati ignores the blurring at the micro-end of the spectrum at the Facebooks, Twitters and Tumblrs of the world. It defines the blogosphere as “the ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.”

The blogosphere is a massive ecosystem with enormous diversity and engagement. Blogging evolved from early listings of websites people liked to personal journals and a community of interest that encouraged conversation. But it was also something else. Peter Merholz coined the term in 1999 when he decided to pronounce “weblog” as “we-blog”. Or blog for shot. Merholz enjoyed the word’s crudeness and dissonance. “I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic”, he recalled. “These sites – mine included – tend to be a kind of information upchucking”.

Even granting that information is not necessarily knowledge, the need to upchuck it has not dissipated. In his response to Technorati’s 2008 report, Chris Pirillo got it right. “The idea of blogging will never disappear,” he said “But the process by content is created, will continue to undergo radical upheavals.”

The death of the blog is exaggerated.

Pandora’s Boxers: Crikey's "serious questions" about women

“The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy, nowadays it means rank subversion," Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1971.

On the whole, I like Crikey and its editor Jonathan Green. Green runs one of the few lively and independent voices in big Australian media and I enjoy their skewering of Australian political and media sacred cows. However, I did not think much of the “serious question” Green asked on Twitter last week. Why, he pondered, don't women subscribe to the online newsletter? Crikey has about 15,000 annual subscribers who pay $100 or thereabouts for a news and current affairs email five day a week. 70 percent of these are male, says Green. According to Green the “unbalance was weird.”

There were five reasons I didn’t think much of his question.

Firstly I am disposed to be cynical and say this is a disguised advertising ploy. Green may want to get people talking, but it wouldn’t hurt to lift his readership by 5,000 people. Secondly there is an assumption that the ratio of male to female readers is somehow an important matter that requires fixing and not merely a reflection of individual taste. Thirdly, if Crikey’s content is geared toward males, then they can solve it themselves. Half of their newsroom are female, as deputy editor Sophie Black reminds us. Though Black wanted “more talk on this”, perhaps they would be better served with more action. Fourthly the question ignores the cost of Crikey and the time investment required to read it. It is a great publication but also a luxury that requires discretionary wealth and time to take up the subscription.

But the fifth and biggest reason I didn’t like it was that Green was doing the “annual airing” of the whole tiresome battle of the sexes argument without a clear agenda as to where it might lead. What then did Green want to see as an outcome if it wasn’t simply about getting more readers for Crikey? Did he not know that many women would use this as an opportunity to remind Green that equality of the sexes remains a distant dream in 21st century Australia. As “a journalist since before you were born”, there are issues Jonathan Green might have been able to foresee.

But there were many who did take Green’s question seriously, including Crikey’s own Scott Steel aka Possum. The writer of Pollytics was inclined to do soul searching about the gender mix of his own readership. He said the ratio of male to female comments on Pollytics and fellow Crikey pseph blog Poll Bludger ranged “between about 4 to 1 on a good day, through to 10 to 1 depending on the topic.” He also bemoaned the “lack of big female political bloggers” and would eventually run into heavy traffic when he damned Hoyden About Town with the faint praise that they “touch[ed] on politics occasionally”.

And then the argument spun off in all sorts of directions. Lisa Gunders took the question head on. Assuming an acceptance of Steel’s premise (which she did not necessarily share), she mentioned two factors. Women wrote about different forms of politics which wend “under the radar”, she said. But the biggest reason was a lack of time. “Women are still carrying the major load in terms of housework and the relational work required to keep a household running these days,” she wrote. “Much of this work isn’t recognised and is so piecemeal that it chews up hours without you having anything to show for it.”

Sarah Stokely noted the women bloggers were there but could not be seen. She linked to Geek Feminist’s question “where are all the men bloggers?” which effectively skewered this particular blindness. Larvatus Prodeo also used the metaphor of sight and the male gaze. Anna Winter’s post there suggested that women were creating alternative niches in the public sphere away from the sexism, the "shrill and angry tone”, and the dismissal of women’s experience they find in the “hard politics blogs”. Winter said that if men were noticing the absence of women wherever they go, then “perhaps the more relevant question is why they are avoiding you”.

Hoyden About Town also weighed in about invisibility. Viv (Tigtog) and Lauredhel’s blog is one of the heavyweight feminist Australian blogs and its comment ratio is closer to 70 to 30 percent in favour of women. But unlike Crikey, it seems to be happy enough with the split, and does not indulge in any hand wringing about changing it. Lauredhel posted five of the comments (three men, two woman) from the Pollytics thread which its readers ripped into. Softestbullet wrote that Jason Wilson’s “Big-p Political” comment means “about dudes.” Lauredhel pointed out that woman also post about gardening, and food, and parenting, and life. “For me,” she wrote, this was “part of that is a deliberate political strategy.”

FuckPoliteness, as the name of the blog suggests, was not inclined to give much truck to Crikey’s arguments. While the big P penis people discussed big P political issues, said the blog's author, women were “just discussing media, law, rape, issues with the medical profession, disability politics, invisibility, breastfeeding discrimination, conduct of politicians, live blogging elections, internet censorship, race politics, divisions in feminism, transphobia, homophobia, talk back radio, life/work/study/family/friends/leisure balances, and about a million other things.” She said that the public sphere that existed in the comment sections of blogs such as Larvatus Prodeo was a race to the bottom where women faced aggression and smug superiority.

That blogger may want to fuck politeness but she does want a place where she could discuss these issues in “open and respectful ways”. But males are everywhere and do not always behave well – despite the best efforts of Crikey, Pollytics, Jason Wilson or Larvatus Prodeo. In a snark-infested internet, perhaps an open and respectful public sphere can only be found in a forum moderated by women. As Lady Psyche in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Princess Ida reminds us:
Man will swear and man will storm-
Man is not at all good form-
Is of no kind of use-
Man's a donkey - Man's a goose-
Man is coarse and Man is plain-
Man is more or less insane-
Man's a ribald - Man's a rake,
Man is Nature's sole mistake!