Comments on: Not an either/or proposition

By: Scott Bridges

Scott Bridges — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:49:08 +0000

By: Iain Hall

Iain Hall — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:07:14 +0000

Scott
Your response is rather typical and does not even address the point that I made in my last comment. Because as I suggested we are both addressing issues of the day and sourcing our information from the public news media. That you choose to paraphrase rather than quote as much as I do is a very minor difference.
I write the posts that I do to inspire/ encourage debate in the comment threads and that has been lively enough with some spirited debate and I think that I would be right to suggest that I have had more comments on the last fifteen posts at my blog than you have had at the fifteen that grace your front page.

On the matter of how many referrals I got from your piece I checked my stats and I got precisely seven referrals from the Crikey email piece and only one trolling comment that I rejected so don’t kid yourself that you are in anyway important to my readership.

By: fred p

fred p — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:09:17 +0000

twobob, do you think that the mods here should let through all comments, even those which “could in some way be construed as libelous”? Assume for the purposes of my question that crikey doesn’t want to get sued.

By: bertus

bertus — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:15:58 +0000

Seems to me THE big problem, and it affects not only publications like newspapers (and blogs) is the monetary system’s inability to process micro-payments.

I reckon there’s a huge chunk of trade and business which could be transacted over the web, which is being held up and/or possibly wrecked, by the bank’s inability to deal with this.

They don’t seem to be able to deal with a payment smaller than $10. So for example, if you buy, say a lotto ticket for $5.50 on your online Lotto account, when you put in your credit card number, the system whirrs away, then it pays $5.50 for your ticket, but also adds $4.50 to the credit in your account, making a transaction of $10.

Now, when you add in all the sneaky little charges and fees that the credit card company subsequently adds on, you find that you have been charged in effect, something like $12 for a $5.50 purchase.

This affects on-line publishing. Stephen King (and others) have tried publishing books in the old-fashioned instalment format, but online. But they ran into this problem, that each instalment cost $10 (or actually $12) so that people were being asked to pay $40 ($48) for a book they could buy in the store for $20. PLUS, they didn’t even get the actual book! If they wanted the book, they would have to print off all that paper and then bind it themselves. To make such online publishing viable, it needs to be cheaper, not more expensive, than the printed version.

I only buy the Thursday and Saturday Age these days, respectively for the TV Guide and the classifieds. I do this not because I’m a scunge, but because that way I have less paper lying around. Recycling becomes a REAL effort if you live in a flat upstairs, with no elevator!

I would be perfectly happy to pay for the online Age (or for Crikey) but I’m reluctant to subscribe ( I never used to buy the Age every day before the internet came along) and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $12 to read the paper!

There’s a fortune here for some compooter/finance geek who can solve the problem of online micro-payments I reckon.

By: Chuggle

Chuggle — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:09:22 +0000

twobob – why is it that you only ever pop in to bag PP? Zoomster (comment 11) was actually trying to put forward an interesting point, and the next thing we’ve got another twobob rant. Contribute something interesting or GO AWAY!

By: twobob

twobob — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:42:53 +0000

Three cheers for “letting the reader get involved by facilitating a proper conversation, unhindered by clunky moderation policies”,
the real shame here though is that at crikey this doesnt exist.
At crikey, the blog Authors own the readers comments so dissent of the type that could in some way be construed as libelous does not get posted. Still three cheers for those who do “allow a proper conversation, unhindered by clunky moderation policies”.
I think that this mythical beast is a lot like the yeti, the loch-ness monster and clean coal though.

By: Tobias Ziegler

Tobias Ziegler — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:41:22 +0000

More on this stuff at Larvatus Prodeo, by the way.

By: zoomster

zoomster — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:33:12 +0000

Part of the problem for the msm here is that for years? decades? ever? their pages have been the only source of information and analysis. There was no competition, because there couldn’t be.

I remember once trying to nail a quote I overheard in an interview on ‘Sunday’, about 1996. To get the transcript, I had to wait for the next day, contact Channel 9 by phone, and get it faxed to me – a turn around of more than 36 hours after the original interview, and thus ‘old news’ by the time I received it. Now, I can get the transcript online within hours.

Similarly with other sources of information: we get the polling results when the msm does, we can watch interviews and media conferences online and replay them if we need to, we get the media releases, government reports etc at exactly the same time the msm does.

Of course, much of this information comes to us through msm sources. The difference, however, is that we now have the tools to analyse what they do with it. If they distort an interview, we know by reference to the transcripts; if they don’t report a poll in full, we know this and can ask why.

You can understand why ‘old’ journos find this challenging and disturbing. Once you wrote an article, and it was holy writ. If someone did question you, the criticism took days to arrive, by which time it seemed irrelevant. Now it’s all instant; five seconds after your article has been posted, the criticisms begin.

The ‘good’ users of the new technology embrace this and enter into a dialogue with their readers (thinking young George M here), which encourages criticism and welcomes different points of view.

By: monkeywrench

monkeywrench — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:35:45 +0000

How heartbreaking for the conservative commentariat that the groundrules have changed: suddenly it’s easy for opinions contrary to their own to be sourced and read! Oh for the good old days when the (conservative) government had intimate links with the (conservative) journalists and public comment was easily censored via the letters-page editor.
What’s irking the Right is that they are being challenged on an even playing-field. How facile this argument is can be judged by the insults they ritually hurl at bloggers who have the temerity to criticise them: puerile, abusive, name-calling…..all features far more in keeping with the hitherto-shameful standards of the News Ltd blogs of Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and Tim Blair.
Boy, they really are stinging on this, aren’t they!

By: Scott Bridges

Scott Bridges — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:15:50 +0000

There are 15 posts currently on the front page of Grods. Five of them link to or quote from a mainstream media article. Of the 10 posts currently on the front page of ~~Boltwatch-watch~~ ~~Heterodox Man~~ ~~The Blowtorch~~ Iain Hall, nine of them quote significantly from mainstream media articles. The tenth is a YouTube video presented without comment. And do you really want to start with the spelling police game, Iain? It's really, really sad that a man so utterly bereft of spelling, punctuation and grammar skills, and so utterly reliant on Microsoft Word spellcheck, and who begs people to focus not on his mistakes but his message, gleefully points out others' typos.