4 posts tagged “blogging”

It's been a while, hasn't it?  Things have been busy, plus, to be honest, I've been a bit lazy about posting here.  Don't get me wrong, I've been reading what everyone's had to say (and commenting occasionally) but haven't been arsed to get anything up here.  Tell you what, taking some of the links around the place to right-wing american nutbags hasn't exactly helped my enthusiasm for vox, either.  When a dickhead like Ted West gets prominence (and note the lack of dissenting opinions over his way thanks to his habit of deleting comments) it makes me rethink any kind of tenure here.

Buckethatted

Anyway, I've been back at work for several weeks now, part-time, and it feels like it's only around now that we've started to get the new rhythms and patterns down in our little household.  I've also spent some of that time thinking and reflecting on the year I had at home with this little one, and some of the broader ideas I've taken away from it.

In the kitchen

I'll resolve to do a little more here shortly, with updates about various things. 

In the past couple of months I've managed to sort out most of the vegetable gardening, start working on my fitness through walking regularly, choose my final two post-grad law subjects for next year, buy a wonderful new mixer we've christened "Betty-Sue" and consequently work on my baking skills, rant at the tv about The Howard Years and Piers "Tony Abbott gives me talking points every Friday" Akerman on Insiders, find out that a 60% part-time attendance at work means about an 80-90% workload expectation, apply for promotions despite this, work out some of what it means to be a half-decent husband and father at this point in the 21st century, decide to get another tattoo, and further consider the wonderful world of single malt whisky (realising that to really get into it means spending a couple of hundred dollars we don't have on club membership in order to get into specific casks and expressions of particular distilleries).  The latter two subjects also mean that I've had to begin facing my inner bogan.  Sigh.  Thought he went away when I used my last black metallica t-shirt to clean the bathroom. 

And that's just for starters.  Talk to you again soon.

Thanks to the whole "wanting to study postgraduate law" thing, I now find myself with two 4,500 word essays due within about the next eight weeks or thereabouts.  So this space will probably just consist of the weekly AFL round preview and not much else until around August. 

I'd be tempted to even give up the round previews every Friday, but I expect that writing about football will be a good break for that part of my brain that needs it.  If I can, I'll have a crack at a team by team midseason analysis after this coming round 11 as well, but it'll be lower priority in comparison to getting this FOI law essay knocked off by June 23rd.  Others are, of course, welcome to have a crack at such a task too. 

So just a heads-up from me that there won't be any other random musings here, or "dadstuff diaries" for that matter, for a couple of months.

There's a very interesting brouhaha on at the moment, more talk and hot air than anything else, but I can't help wondering if it's signifying anything more.

The Australian, flagship national daily owned by News Ltd, publishes Newspolls on a regular basis, and they've generally been spinning them as positively as possible for the government in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 

This sort of dodgy analysis (primarily by Dennis Shanahan) has, quite rightly, been commented upon by the likes of Mumble and OzPolitics in cold hard analysis of their own.  See also Possum Pollytic's wonderful regression calculations.   

So yesterday afternoon Peter Brent of Mumble gets a call from Chris Mitchell, editor of the Australian -

A courtesy call from Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell this morning informed me that the paper is going to "go" Charles Richardson (from Crikey) and me tomorrow. 

Chris said by all means criticise the paper, but my "personal" attacks on Dennis had gone too far, and the paper will now go me "personally".

No, I'm not making this up.

If they only get as personal as I get with Dennis, then it should be tame, as I don't believe I've ever criticised anything other than his writing.

And to think I described Dennis, in a chapter in a book being launched this month, as (with no sarcasm) "a fine journalist".

All very strange. And - I'd be lying if I didn't admit - a little stomach-churning.

Which ends up being a snarky editorial in today's edition of The Australian (aka "The Government Gazette" across the Australian political blogosphere).  So this has kicked off a bunch of discussions across the blogosphere - see The Road to Surfdom, Larvatus Prodeo and John Quiggin among others for examples.

And yet it gets more interesting.  Tim Dunlop, former mainstay at The Road to Surfdom before taking up a gig "inside the tent" with News Ltd online at Blogocracy, wrote a really good piece about it all this morning as well - which was taken down from the site within about an hour or two (note the empty page here where it used to be).  You can read a copy of it here.  Latest word is that Tim Dunlop has resigned rather than have such interference from News Ltd management.  Hasn't been a peep over at Blogocracy since, and it looks like comments have now stopped.

There'll no doubt be further word tomorrow - just thought I'd summarise as I think there could be more on this over the next few days...

Update Friday morning:

"The Orstrayhun" has a much better (albeit longer and harsher) summary, noting Crikey's much more central role, and ending with the breathlessly melodramatic conclusion that

Digital democracy has come hard and fast to The Australian, and they don't like the fact that on an average Newspoll day more than 80% (my rough estimate) of the comments aired on the boards portray a highly opinionated, often venomous, sprawl of Australian readers who simply do not agree with the way The Australian editorial team interprets the Newspoll results, and regularly claim that the writers are spinning for Howard Corp.

It'll be interesting to watch the mainstream media and blogstream reactions to all this in the next few days.

One thing is now certain.

The Blogstream Vs The Mainstream Media wars in Australia have begun. 

Be interesting to see if Media Watch picks up on this as well.

List time, hooray!

The 30 best blogs you (maybe) aren't reading from Fimoculous.com , here's a couple of my favourites-

...

13. Make Magazine
Even though this blog is arguably pretty popular, I'm including the work of the indefatigable Phillip Torrone because the trend of life hacking and productivity really started to emerge this year. Make's philosophy is simple: anything can be DIY if you just figure out how to hack it. (See also: Lifehacker & 43 Folders & Life Clever.)

12. 3 Quarks Daily
3 Quarks Daily sets the paradigm for what a good personal blog should be: eclectic but still thematic, learned but not boring, writerly but not wordy. (See also: Snark Market & wood s lot.)