Welcome anyone who’s arrived here since listening to Radio National. For others, you may be interested in a discussion on blogging on Radio National this morning. I prompted it by emailing Geraldine Doogue suggesting that she consider doing a regular weekly or monthly ‘around the blogs’ segment on her show Saturday Extra using Missing Link as a prompt for talent. The crew at the program were interested and had me and another blogger in for a bit of a gasbag. It was quite an interesting introductory discussion and I hope there are more.
(And there were a couple of mistakes early on a Saturday morning. I’m not the founder of Club Troppo – I guess I could be said to be a co-founder with Ken, but really Club Troppo was just a slight rebadging and relocation of the child of Ken’s heart and brain Troppoarmadillo. They’ve also left the ‘au’ off our url. Anyway I’ve asked for these errors to be corrected on the website.)
As is so often said about real estate, three considerations to be observed in gaining the attention of potential buyers is position, position, position.
Nice work, Nick.
Though I’m not sure if Geraldine gets it – “the era of online diaries or weblogging is upon us”… And RN could do a better job with their online content – it would be much easier to post smaller audio files labelled with the subject rather than have to fast forward without too much guidance as to where the story you’re interested can be found. In this instance, it’s in the second hour and the window that my browser opened didn’t even give me the facility to find a particular story by referring to how many minutes along it was. It would also be nice to have some links to the blogs you referred to to make consulting them easier for the listeners.
Incidentally, on the question of whether blogs will replace newspapers over breakfast, I usually don’t eat breakfast so I have my morning cup of coffee in front of the computer screen and I look at blogs via Google Reader before I look at any of the newspaper’s websites. The only dead tree papers I buy now are the Fin and the Wednesday Australian for the Higher Ed and/or the ALR, and solely because the content isn’t online. I think a lot of media research shows that this sort of news consumption isn’t at all unusual for Gen X and Gen Y folks.
Gruen on blogging…
Nice work from Nicholas Gruen on Radio National talking to Geraldine Doogue about blogging. Though Im not sure if Geraldine gets it – the era of online diaries or weblogging is upon us and assuming that 150 visits to a blog a day is a high …
The url for Julie Shiels’ blog is also wrong, and they’re not hyperlinks, meaning that you have to cut and paste them into your browser. Really user unfriendly!
This is a portal which leads to her blogs:
http://julieshiels.com.au/
I am not up with Google Reader, if I want an overview of the blogs I go to the feeds at Byran Palmer’s Oz Politics.
Mark,
Stories hard to find?
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/default.htm
Personally, I find the ABC’s online content superior to any other media outlet and considerably easier to navigate than some. Then, I spend a lot of time on the ABC sites
Thanks, linohan. Obviously I should have looked further than the link!
Listohan, sorry!
Julie Shiel is an interesting choice. She is kind of a mate of mine, and I get lots of laughs out of her desecration of abandoned mattresses on the streets of St Kilda, but her take on blogging is deep in arts land. So using the two of you is good for range, but not to define the mainstream.
I was surprised to hear that you rated Cattalaxy as one of your three favourite blogs Nick. Were you just trying to be ‘balanced’?
Happy Blog birthday, Prof Q!…
Via Helen, props to John Quiggin for five years of blogging. We’ve been reading (and listening) recently to Geraldine Doogue welcoming in the “age of online diaries and weblogging”. I think that all that has to be said about the dumbn…
Chris, I was surprised to hear that you rated Cattalaxy as one of your three favourite blogs Nick.
The big three are undoubtedly catallaxy, LP and troppo. They act as dark matter in the auian blogosphere drawing in writers, comments and discussion. There are other large ones of course; such as quiggin, dunlop and sauer-thompson, but there is definately a wider dynamic going on between the cata-lar-oppo sites.
Nice interview Nick (but yes it also took me a while to find it on ABC’s website!).
I was trying to be representative yes.
I also regret not mentioning a few other blogs – but that’s often the way with acknowledgements.
Just got around to listening to this. You did a great job, Nick, in getting across the importance of interactivity in blogs, in correcting errors, bringing in fresh information, and so on. The Hew Griffiths example was well made. Anyone who read the comments on your post would have ended up with much more perspective than someone who just read it in the New Matilda. Are there comments threads in the on-line journal itself?
Yes, if you’re talking about NM’s comments, yes there were comments in that thread. They simply shared the author’s outrage, but didn’t take things any further.