Online Opinion e-journal (run by Graham Young and Hugh Brown) has recently implemented a feature called The Domain, which provides a one-stop shop page displaying excerpts from and links to new posts on a range of prominent Australian political blogs including Troppo. It appears to update itself every couple of hours, which makes it a useful feature for readers who want to save a bit of time without going to the bother of setting up their own RSS or similar feed.
I’ve also added 3 new political bloggers to the Troppo blogroll, namely Cameron Riley, Trevor Cook and David Madden. I’ve assigned all three to the centrist category at the moment, but mostly because I haven’t had time to read them for long enough to pgeon-hole them reliably.
Keep an eye on Counterspin and the Poll Vault, as they’re both turning up some interesting new blogs on a regular basis.
Thanks for the reciprocity Ken! I should say that Hugh has moved on to a higher calling – he is now a lecturer at UQ. Susan Prior is filling the editor’s role at the moment. We’re interested in keeping an eye out for new blogs. One thing a site like ours can do, that a personal RSS feed can’t as easily, is share around knowledge about worthwhile newcomers.
Cameron Riley’s site is a 20th century nightmare! Hand coding is naff! But “Imagining Australia” looks to be very interesting indeed.
Public Opinion is a “prominent blog”? According to The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem, Silent Running (#201), Arthur Chrenkoff (#246), Dissecting Leftism (#344), Myself (#440), and Paul + Carl’s Daily Diatribe (#471) are all much more prominent than Public Opinion, which comes in at #827.
Given that all the above named are right-leaning to various degrees, and Public Opinion is as far to the left as you can get without falling over the edge, perhaps there’s some other criteria for selection?
By my count: 4 centrist blogs (Catallaxy, Troppo, Ambit Gambit, Imagining Australia) 1 Right-leaning blog (Blair), and 4 Left-leaning (Quiggin, Dunlop, Sheil and Sauer-Thompson). I don’t know about the other the guy either.
Not having Chrenkoff on there at least, suggests this isn’t so much about quality as picking sides. Sauer-Thompson is right up there with Niall Cook in terms of quality.
Yobbo, the TLB rankings are not very accurate. Your blog is in there twice, so it counts all the internal links. Public Opinion actually has more incoming links than you do.
It’s unfair, innit, Sam? I’d stamp my foot if I was you!
I know it always does me a world of good when I’m feeling all pouty to get some good foot-stamping action happening. Just make sure you don’t slam any doors.
Thanks Ken, would you mind changing it to “South Sea Republic” please, rather than “Riley, Cameron”. I put it on the scoop codebase with the hope of building a community there, in the same way that other scoop sites like; k5, HuSi, dailykos and red state have done.
South Sea Republic has a diary section that any logged in user can publish too, but the articles section is like k5 and has to go through a moderation queue where other members of the community vote on whether to publish the article or not. The vote also determines if the article is published to the front page or section as well.
As the community and users grow there (hopefully) whether the site leans one way or the other will become an emergant property from the community, rather than just me prattling on.
I have been posting on scoop sites for many years now, and only just discovered the australian political commentary in the movabletype style blogs. So I am enjoying reading and discovering the large number of Australian commentators out there that publish in that format. Australians tend to be a minority on the scoop sites and get drowned out by the US, UK and Euro voices. Which is part of the reason why I started up a scoop site with a focus on Australian politics.
Oh okay. I don’t read any of the other ‘scoop’ sites you mention and I’m totally unfamiliar with the idea. Sorry if I sounded patronising.
Mark: It’s not unfair, it’s biased. Can’t you see the difference?
Public Opinion is a “prominent blog”?
Yes, in the sense of “a prominent pimple on one’s nose”.
Yobbo, the list was compiled quickly on the basis mostly of Ken’s helpful classifications and listing of political blogs. Criteria were to have a balance between points of view; have significant posts on Australian domestic politics; have an rss or rdf feed; and be of high quality. We don’t judge quality on the number of visits. Most of the blogs you mention are focussed on international politics and/or don’t appear to have syndication capabilities. The problem with your blog is you’d be likely to run us foul of some of the spam filters! ;-) The word “free” gets us into trouble sometimes, so you can imagine what the other “f” word would do.
It’s not so long ago that Ken was suggesting I run a Liberal Party line, now you’ve got me as a closet socialist. The truth is, we’re happy to look at blogs on their merits and the list isn’t closed. All suggestions will be gratefully considered.
I don’t have you pegged as a socialist, I was just shocked to see Public Opinion up there and described as a “prominent blog”, when in fact the only people who read it are Margo Kingston and Tim Blair. Margo because she’s about as crazy as Sauer-Thompson, and Blair because he likes to make fun of him.
Im not suggesting my blog should be on there, but Arthur Chrenkoff’s should. It’s as popular and well-known as Blair, Dunlop, Quiggin et al. It’s even being reproduced in the Wall St. Journal.
Perhaps the reason that the left-leaning blogs are more devoted to Australian politics is because of their shared fanatical hatred of Howard. Right-wing blogs are generally more concerned with the war on terror at this point in time, the Australian federal election isn’t really news in comparison.
To most of us, a Latham Labor government winning would be annoying but bearable. To the left, another 3 years of Howard will probably result in rioting/mass suicide and god knows what else.
So what if it is biased, Yobs? It’s a private website, isn’t it? C’mon, you’re just unhappy that Graham’s being unfair to your mates ;-)
Makes sense, though. Leftish ‘blogs — with the exception of “blogtwins” Quiggin and Dunlop — tend to have a little variety, whereas rightish ‘blogs (yours is an exception, probably because of all the posts about Asian chicks, as is that of Jon Ray, because he’s an out-and-out nutcase) tend to be very party-line, just going from Ken’s links list[0] here. And by “party-line” I mean, “I can’t tell youse bastards apart, especially those that use Blogspot templates”.
What would you prefer, two ‘blogs you disagree with, one of which says “George Bush is dumb” and the other which says “John Howard lies”, or two ‘blogs you agree with, both of which say “Michael Moore is fat”? Variety is the spice of life, Sam!
[0] The term “‘blogroll” is an abomination unto God and man, yea, and He shall smite all who employ it. So it has been written, so it shall be done!
(And who’s Arthur Chrenkoff, anyway?)
Mark
I wondered the same thing. I’d never heard of him until Sam mentioned him on this thread. But I just went and looked at his blog. Its contents are mostly US-focused, like many RWDBs, and have identical subjects and viewpoints to all the other RWDB blogs. But he does seem to be Australian, so I’ll add him to the blogroll in the interest of completeness (if only for the momentary pleasure of waiting for him to post a comment demanding that I remove it again!!!)
Mark: http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com
Thanks, Sam.
Ken… um… check the footnote again, will you? There’s a good fellow.
My version of God is a Paul Davies universal non-anthropomorphic spirit of complexity and elaboration. It isn’t into smiting at all, and does not in conscience object to blogrolls. Nor do I. So there. It’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to, and call my blogroll a blogroll, because it IS a fucking blogroll.
Ken, do you have a link back to that thread you posted a while back about thoughtful right-leaning blogs? It just occurred that it might be of some help to Graham in his evaluation of them.
Just out of interest, Yobbo, how much traffic do the right-leaning blogs focussed on “the war on terror” and/or US domestic politics get from IPs in the States?
Mark, that same thought crossed my mind. My whole site gets around 100,000 site visits each month, which is miniscule compared to the visits to the top US sites listed on The Truth Laid Bare, but enough to make us second to Crikey and Green Left Weekly in Australia. It makes you realise that if you can tap the US market, on the crude measure of visits and hits you are going to do very well. I wondered if that was the secret of Chrenkoff’s success. Is it more evidence of globalisation at work that a polish emigre sitting in his living room in presumably Brisbane can be a significant voice in the US, and virtually unknown to bloggers from his own country?
Having said that, I don’t have a problem with putting a feed up to him, and in fact recently solicited republication rights to an article that he had published in the Wall Street Journal. Actually came as a surprise to me that he was in the journal because I had never heard of his blog, and in fact the last I heard of him he was a Queensland Young Liberal. While we’re an Australian site, we pay attention to overseas news as well, so if I can work out how his feed works, we’ll list him.
Graham,
It makes you realise that if you can tap the US market, on the crude measure of visits and hits you are going to do very well.
A site I have maintained for many years not is australianflyingcorps.org, I thought it would be of marginal interest to Australians, even more so to the rest of the world. But by the server logs in 2002, 50% of the site’s audience was American and about 20% of site’s audience was European.
Thanks for the comparo Sam. I feel quite chuffed to be categorised in the same slot as Gary Sauer-Thompson.
Arthur Chrenkoff is the Australian blogger of 2004. He’s gone from nobody to published in the WSJ purely on the strength of his blog. Regardless of your political views, that is just sensational. I’ve been busting my arse on Ubersportingpundit for years now to get published, and this little arsehole has done it in six months or so. That is just great, and well done to Arthur for it.
Maybe you should start writing about ice hockey and gridiron, Scott?
(Other American sports might work as well. Y’could try hiring me to write about Australian softball; I work cheap!)