See sidebar at right for links to Missing Link "best blog/alt media" reading recommendations. If you see an excellent post in your blog ramblings please link it here with a brief explanation/review so we can consider including it.
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Can I make a suggestion? Ok. I will. No professional blogs run by journos or opinion pages for media organisations masquerading as "blogs": no Punch, Drum, Crikey, certainly no blog hosed by a paper. I'd include "gatekeeper" blogs run by people who love to tell other people how to blog and how to write, but that's cutting down the options.
I thought about adding a note to that effect, Tony. But then it occurred to me that there are numerous "real" blogosphere veterans who have gone over to the MSM darkside in one way or another or were already there but previously blogged independently. Mumble, Tim Blair, Tim Dunlop (now frequently publishes in ABC opinion pages like Drum) and various Crikey-ites like Possum. I don't really see why we should exclude them and limit this to the determinedly "amateur" bloggers. Mostly the MSM "blogs" are fairly pedestrian in quality anyway and unlikely to be tagged more than occasionally, I suspect.
The Australian political blogosphere has matured IMO to a point where it's no longer possible or sensible to draw a rigid differentiation between "real" blogs and the MSM. Moreover, despite attempts to appropriate blogging, the MSM has not succeeded in doing so. If anything they've been forced to adapt to the fact that they're now only one part (if still the dominant one in many ways) of a diverse online media landscape which they cannot control.
OK here's my first recommended post. Possum Comitatus has an excellent piece of investigative, analytical journalism establishing fairly compellingly that all the Coalition-generated hyperbole about deaths and house fires flowing from the botched Rudd government Home Insulation Scheme was wrong. If anything the scheme actually made the industry safer (despite the criticisms of the Auditor-General about waste etc).
Agree with your reasoning @2 Ken.
Well, if threads of doom are your thing...
Ken
It was the best thing in the Orstrayan blogosphere. May it return to rain over us.
2nd best
[HT: GT above]
Indeed. It has become reminiscent of those halcyon days of debate on Kuta beach over who was a real traveler, and who was a mere tourist.
OK, this is good and opens up an interesting field for discussion:
Given that this is a "recommend posts" thread rather than one for ongoing discussion, I shouldn't even respond to Gummo at all. But I can't help asking: if not Abbott then who? Hockey is a joke. Julie Bishop? I don't think so. Turnbull at least has the courage of his convictions on the few things he he believes in apart from his manifest destiny, but if you were a Liberal you would have to seriously doubt his political skills. Who else? Until there's a plausible answer Tony's safe.
Ken,
What can I say - except that it's never been known for an Australian political party to ask "If not this lame duck then who?"
Ken - I've got an idea. I do a bit of media monitoring for work Mon-Thurs. So since I've got a routine going, maybe I could do a weekly Missing Link for Troppo on Fridays.
We can start by working up a list of Aussie blogs worth following and I'll pop them into my feed reader.
What do you think?
Excellent Don. I'll email you about it.
Recomended posts as distinct from blogs gets me confused. Blog hosts or contributors? For a good blog stoush between two talented (driven?) bloggers I recommend 'Fran' and 'Alice' on John Quiggin very recently.
I'm with Tones- and how about not using anything by academics boosting their cv / publications/ public engagement KPIs by "blogging" on a salary in their discipline.
Ah but then we'd be left with fuck all.
As you were. carry on....
Resource Tax Botched by Ken Parish
Gear Up Australia. Our Government needs more debt by Peter Martin
Please Explain by Ken Parish
Andrew Leigh's Maiden Speech
What are we trying to do on Asylum Seeker policy? by Greg Jericho
Insulation Dire Risk - the data is in by Possum
I'll have a couple more later. I've just been called away.
My last post obviously got caught in the spam filter with a multitude of links. My apologies for that but if it could be released as well.
Also here are the last two as promised in the first post.
Is it so difficult for a journalist to ask "why?" by Jeremy Sear
Both atheism rationalism and Catholic triumphalism betray Mary MacKillop's legacy by Mark Bahnisch
There's been a lot of froth and bubble on the Kirsty Fraser-Kirk v DJs sexual harassment case. For a quality legal analysis, I recommend this post by my co-blogger, Legal Eagle:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/26/abuse-of-process-and-damages-claims/
I liked Tim Dunlop's post about online journalism.
I wish you would include Ad Astra's "The Political Sword"
http://www.thepoliticalsword.com/
Hi Lyn
I just noticed you're doing a "daily links" service over at The Political Sword (a great blog that I'm about to add to the sadly outdated Troppo blog roll).
I was wondering if you might be prepared to cross-post your service here at Troppo's "Missing Link Daily" post once we get the ratings and "Twitter feed" functions working? Together with Don's weekly roundup (which he does intend to make a regular Friday feature), it would provide an invaluable service to blog readers and help expose the riches of the blogosphere to a largely time-poor audience. That's what I originally hoped to achieve by starting ML some years ago, but we ran out of "puff". I'm hoping that a more "organic", audience-led structure will prove more sustainable.
A Marxist medico (you'd think that was rather like military intelligence) named Tad Tietze has an excellent review of the new book Zombie Economics by blogosphere Godfather John Quiggin. It sounds like mandatory reading and I'll certainly be buying a copy.
To my taste the review is rather spoiled by Tietze's overtly Marxist agenda, which rather contrasts with JQ's own carefully considered social democratic position. As far as I can tell from reading JQ for quite a few years, long years of close observation have led him to the conclusion that the marxist/socialist "solution" is every bit as destructive of the fair, free society as its neoliberal antithesis.
That's also essentially my reaction to the highly entertaining but rather silly diatribe Nicholas extracted earlier today. It's certainly true that a more passionate, engaged stance from "progressives" might help to push the ubiquitous Gillard/Rudd pragmatist politicians of today in the direction of actually embracing some substantive policies and making real attempts to implement them rather than focusing solely on spin and endless expedient compromise devoid of any core beliefs at all. Presumably that was Nicholas's motivation in posting it at Troppo. But God forbid if the likes of "Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash" should ever succeed in "tak[ing] over the Democratic Party" or its Oz equivalent ALP. I certainly wouldn't vote for a party with such policies in a pink fit. Fortunately the vast majority of the mung bean left are utterly incapable of organising a chook raffle in a pub or a root in a brothel.
Helen Webberley's blog ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly has some wonderful posts. The real Ponte Vecchio in Florence - http://melbourneblogger.blogspot.com/2010/10/real-ponte-vecchio-in-florence.html -tells the story of a rather unusual corridor.
Ken, this doesn't seem to be getting traction. Would it be better to reword it, to leave it up for say three days, then to move it to an archive? Wording something like this: "This is your chance to nominate your favourite blog post. Every three days we will move the post plus nominations to a new page. You can find past nominations here. Please browse for the best of the Australian blogosphere". Then put a date in the header, maybe some additional comments in the text as you go along.
The November Feminist Carnival (sort of a cross between Missing Link and Best Blog Posts) is available, with links to lots of interesting posts.
Nicholas Gruen has lauded columnist Jack Marx at Troppo before. I really hated the gratuitous hatchet job he did on Little Stevie Wright, but he's a damn fine prose stylist and this column about American astronaut Alan Shepard is a really lovely piece of writing.
Ken
Care to help us out by suggesting one?
THE OPPORTUNITY COST OF THE MISSING LINK
Jim Belshaw (@ #25 above) correctly pointed out that this is not gaining traction. Does it matter? Should it be left here anyway?
The problem with doing so is that it crowds out other posts from the 'opening view' of Troppo. When I open Troppo (which I do less rarely now), all I see is the unexciting and unchanging "Missing Link - Reader Participation Model" entry, which is now a turn off. Call me Generation Zish, but I often don't have the patience to scroll down and see if there is anything new and worthwhile on Troppo. I am a channel flicker, basically, and there is much more alluring stuff - specifically, new posts - on the opening views of too many other blogs to keep bringing me back here.
I don't have access to Troppo's viewing stats, but I'd hazard a guess that they're lower as a result of the permanent Missing Link entry at the top of the page. If so, I'd say that its time Mising Link went missing.
You might have noted that it's now a much-shrunken item which simply contains links to Don Arthur's week's ML, Lyn's Daily links at Political Sword and my daily ML on Twitter. I want this to stay at the top of the page so readers have a convenient and prominent entry point to check the best current posts in the blogosphere. If readers post their own notifications of additional good links that's great but not critical. Troppo is committed to promoting the broader blogosphere and its communal or collaborative potential. Hence ML, the Best Blog Posts exercise with Online Opinion each year etc. Collaboration, crowd-sourcing and building communities are what social media is all about and they have a wide range of potentially exciting and positive aspects. It inevitably involves trial and error. That's why I started the Twitter-based ML only last week.
BTW Troppo's page reads have actually been trending up gently in recent weeks, although no long term trend is visible. We don't run Troppo to maximise readership in any event (we would run it very differently if we were aiming at that, not least by fostering a tribal vibe like the big right and left-leaning blogs do), and increasing Troppo readership per se (as opposed to that of the wider blogosphere) certainly isn't the objective of ML. As I explained, we're aiming at fostering linkages and communities. Specifically ML is aimed at making the broader blogosphere more accessible to casual readers who might not otherwise bother.
Anyway thanks for the feedback.
And thanks for the response, Ken. I still do wonder whether you might be able to reduce the space given the the ML segment - or maybe give a 'most recent posts' listing on the right hand side of the openning view. I'd also trade off a little bit of white space above the troppo banner for some more material on the opening view. Anyhow, maybe you're not really trying to appeal to ADHD-afllicted, Gen Z channel flickers like me anyway... T>
Note that Breakfast Politics is in hiatus until 2011.
Perhaps the most gripping post I have ever read -http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2010/12/03/incredible-insights-into-the-saving-of-qf32-revealed-in-the-atsb-preliminary-report/
Thanks Jim. I just added it to today's ML Twitter feed.