https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JlLFKUF_eA This video discussion, audio downloadable here, discusses the issues raised in this post. I've previously expressed some dissatisfaction with what I might call a 'one dimensional' understanding of the idea of liberty. This post explo...

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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

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Some of you may have noticed a Twitter account called ' Sarhanis '. In any event, Antonios Sarhanis is its proprietor and we got to talking on Twitter and discovered that we shared various maladies. He's interested in philosophy but pretty unimpressed with the way it's handled...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo Lateral Economics has been commissioned by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to estimate the value of the Australian Census to the Australian community. As part of that exercise we've got the go-ahead from ABS to do something...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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Just a note to record the fact that blogging is 20 years old this month, maybe. New media legend Dave Winer, a rare combination of great writer and programmer, started posting at DaveNet on 7 October 1994 , as Philip Greenspun points out. There was no announcement that Winer h...

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You may notice that I have changed the masthead motto, which until now read "the suppository of centrist wisdom since 2012". It was a somewhat snide and gratuitous reference to a Tony Abbott malapropism uttered in the leadup to the 2013 federal election (and pretty much on a p...

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Hoist from archives for a brief re-appearance. [caption id="attachment_24972" align="alignright" width="350"] A value we hold dear at Troppo - what's there not to like about being open and authentic? A Christmas Season message from Troppo[/caption] A Troppo community service:...

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For quite a few years Club Troppo has had a self-appointed mission to bring the best of blogosphere writing to a wider audience. There’s a lot of rich, diverse, high quality material out there, much more so than in the mainstream “print” media, degraded as it is by competitive...

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Want to save time and identify the best in Australian blogosphere writing? See these features built into the recently re-designed Troppo front page. If you can't find several excellent articles every day of the week among that lot, you're very hard to please: "Blog reading sel...

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It's a sad day in the Aus blogosphere. Leading left-leaning group blog Larvatus Prodeo has folded its capacious tent and joined the ranks of ex- parrots blogs. Supremo senior commissar Mark Bahnisch explains the public rationale: We collectively feel seven years is enough. I t...

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I don't imagine we'll be running Best Blog Posts this year. Certainly I won't have time to be involved. Moreover, we never actually anointed an annual winner in any event, just an undifferentiated group of 30 or 40 of the best from the non-MSM blogosphere. However, if I WAS se...

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Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World's Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success . I'm not interested in the subject per se , because I long ago concluded that the recipe w...

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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion ] I spend my working life running an online media firm - WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day - with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Yo...

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At CDU Law Online - Colourful lawyers, police and the media (the Adam Houda wrongful arrest saga).

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My blogging time over the last few days has been absorbed by creating a "social media presence" for my employer CDU Law School. It involves not only a blog but also Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn facilities. It's been something of a struggle to convince the powers-tha...

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After his first week of blogging back in 2002 John Quiggin observed that blogging "technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level." Maybe he's changed his mind. This week Quiggin suggests that The Austr...

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Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ' The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur ' where I suggest that blogging isn't about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I'm attacking a straw man: ... just who is saying that blogging is intended to repl...

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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur , he wr...

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A popular writer at leading Australian political blog The Political Sword has hit back at "pedantic" criticism of her work. Responding to a series of posts at Club Troppo (an obscure political blog frequented by boring middle-aged men) Feral Skeleton writes : Some stuffed shir...

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Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story . Investigative...

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Almost as depressing as the evident plagiarism in HillBillySkeleton's post-truth politics post is its unremitting, one-eyed left wing bias. The Political Sword is the ideological mirror image of Andrew Bolt's blog only much less entertaining. The most recent post there is a le...

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Last year Mayhill Fowler, one of the Huffington Post 's citizen journalists, threatened to stop blogging unless the Post started paying her . After a brief exchange of emails where Fowler explained she was no longer prepared to do her reporting for free, the Post' s founding e...

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At Menzies House , Tim Andrews argues that "we should have public debate free from fear of attack, and free from fear of retaliation." According to Andrews, it's not acceptable for activists to try to influence a media outlet's editorial policy by targeting its advertisers. An...

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Observant Media watchers might have noticed a story on the ABC The Drum site this morning to the effect that Club Troppo and Larvatus Prodeo had quit the Domain blog group headed by Graham Young's Online Opinion . LP's letter to Graham was apparently leaked by person/s unknown...

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It's easy to miss the point in the debate about Online Opinion 's loss of advertising revenue. As Kim at Larvatus Prodeo points out , the debate isn't really about free speech -- it's not as if publishers have a right to corporate funding. The important point is about how onli...

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Christopher Pearson writes in the Weekend Australian about a current situation involving Club Troppo and other prominent oz political blogs: GRAHAM Young is the founding editor of a well-regarded e-journal called On Line Opinion, and is a regular contributor to The Australian....

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Not so long ago I published a post titled: The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957 . Essentially I argued that, despite all the despairing navel-gazing and prognostications of doom for MSM news and political journalism posed by free content on the Internet, especia...

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By now you've probably heard about social media and how it's making celebrities out of mild mannered public servants and chirpy journalists who think in 140 character bursts . Maybe you're wondering whether a witty and intelligent person like yourself could also become an inte...

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ABC The Drum/Unleashed editor Jonathan Green a couple of days ago: Waiting until just after 3.30 this afternoon before fronting the media and addressing today's asylum seeker tragedy made Opposition spokesman Scott Morrison look the model of restraint. "A day of sadness as wor...

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For five years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>’. With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch ‘Best Blog Posts of 2010?. On Lin...

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Some readers may have noticed from the "sticky" permanent post at the top of Troppo's front page that we've revived the old Missing Link feature in two separate forms: a weekly themed digest by Don Arthur; a daily Twitter-based service compiled mostly by me and delivered via N...

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Peter Timmins reviews the progress through the Senate (or rather lack of same) of a proposed limited "shield" law to protect the confidentiality of journalists' sources. As Peter noted, I gave evidence and made a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee on t...

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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media. Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects. It's probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers...

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Welcome to Missing Link Friday -- a quick tour of a few of the issues Australian bloggers have been following during the week. Will it become a regular feature? Let's see. I'll be running this alongside Ken Parish's new reader-driven Missing Link where you get to share your fa...

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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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Gummo Trotsky, the Methuselah of erudite commentary, now has his very own blog . And he's "come out" under his real name, what's more. He calls the blog Sardonic Detachment Therapy. Gummo can be sardonic, but detached? I think I'll keep calling him Gummo anyway. I'm a creature...

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Remember me? That grumpy old bloke who once obsessively spewed forth half-baked opinions here at Troppo? After being AWOL for some time a comeback of sorts seems imminent. I'm experiencing fitful urges to post, usually on very silly topics like whether Jen may have committed r...

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For four years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>'. With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch 'Best Blog Posts of 09'. On Line...

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A paper called Blogometrics has created a ranking of economics bloggers and their blogs based on citations of their academic publications. Hat tip to The Economic Way of Thinking (Beaulier, Boettke and Prykitcho). My new, outstanding colleague in Econ, Frank Mixon, and his co-...

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While it's very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd 'meta' discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today - by virtue of the publicat...

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For the third year running, On Line Opinion and Club Troppo are collaborating to collect an anthology of Australian blog posts from the previous year. The first handful have now been published at OLO ; by the end of the month the collection will grow to about forty articles. F...

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UPDATE, 24 December: Many thanks for the nominations so far. We have enough to get started on, but would love to double the number. Therefore, we're extending the deadline to 10 January! But please post your nominations sooner rather than later, so we can get on with the judgi...

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We've always had a pretty laissez faire attitude towards commenting at Club Troppo. Contrary to the impressions of some, we have only ever banned two or three persistent trolls, and only ever delete comments that are persistently abusive or defamatory. However, there have been...

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On reading Margaret Simons classification of blogs I wonder what kind of blog Troppo is. No doubt others have joined in on other blogs. Anyway, she puts Catallaxy, LP and Andrew Norton's blogs in the category of 'pamphleteering' blog. That's interesting because although I woul...

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We already use the opportunities that the web 2.0 world offers a bit, but we could be doing a lot more . For those who haven't seen it yet here is Lindsay Tanner's blog. Worth keeping an eye on I'd say. He's posed a bunch of questions - as follows. Hightail it over there and a...

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QUT researcher Axel Bruns (presumably along with usual colleagues Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders) has just published some new quantitative research about blogs which contains some interesting results. He/they undertook a textual analysis of 3 prominent blogs with somewhat div...

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Cute site .

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Jacques is advising us that we should upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. He may well be right, but Nicholas and I are nervous/remaining to be convinced. Apparently there are some potential security issues with the version we're currently running. Our concern is that j...

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I was going to put this in the snark section of Missing Link but decided it deserved a post of its own. Tim Blair is currently stoushing with a trio of academic researchers into blogging and "citizen journalism". Jason Wilson , Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders apparently have an...

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