Posts by giovanni tiso
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Russell Brown,
A few other people called in and had their speech summarily curtailed by the hosts, too. They got hung up on. Hooton got thrown out of the studio.
It may have been said upthread, but this whole right to free speech resembles more and more the right to have your own radio show for fifteen hours a week. When do we all get one of those then?
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to James Butler,
It's like the Man Ban: if you can convince enough people to call it a duck loudly enough and frequently enough then it is a duck.
I called it a sponsor boycott a number of times myself. What I meant is that the sponsors boycotted the show.
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That's a nasty rumour, most bottles at Hashigo Zake cost less than your average black market kidney.
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Oh thank you.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Craig Young,
I thought it was pretty good. It didn't excuse the outburst, but correctly pointed out that they weren't adequately supported in their work by the station. Which also means having expectations of them. (I feel the same way about so many of our columnists, who would turn in much less ignorant and hateful opinions if only editors started to demand more of them.)
But I don't think he was justifying the episode at all. More explaining the conditions that allowed it to happen.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Kumara Republic,
If they whinge about censorship, they’ve obviously never been to Gitmo Bay or Siberia.
I find the free speech angle ludicrous. And frankly it's been voiced by a number of people who are clearly worried about what might happen next time they say or do something misogynist themselves.
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Thank you Simon. That's awfully generous.
I must say, I haven't read many of the comments online, but the emails I got were overwhelmingly of support. Some just... I don't have words to describe what they have meant to me. And while there have been a few downright abusive ones (not all that many), there have also been ones that I'm hopeful will develop into mutually useful conversations. That would be a great outcome.
All told, though, I've been in a really privileged place. The brave people are the ones who told their story. And there have been so many. Few things have moved me as much as the 100+ comments to Marama Davidson and Leonie Pihama's open letter to Willie & JT.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
This neatly matches their relative ratio of Google Reader subscribers. (And both blogs existed before Google Reader, so we should expect the take up to have been similar.)
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Russell Brown,
You could say that the best use of those numbers is to measure trends over time on a single site.
Yes, precisely. I came quite quickly to the conclusion that the only use of those statistics is to track one's blog over time. In fact I sort of planned it that way from the beginning, as every one of my posts stays up as 'front page' for exactly a week. And I care about that number of returning readers ticking up over time a great deal - I'm not a stats snob by any means.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Russell Brown,
Top of the table by miles, is Whaleoil, which leads Gio and others to argue that the stats are somehow invalid or misleading, which they aren’t. They are what they are.
I'm going to do my spiel about this. Bear with me, or not. It’s incredibly boring.
During the David Shearer beneficiary on the roof saga, Whaleoil linked prominently in one of his posts to the transcript I posted on my blog of Shearer's interview with Dunedin Radio One broadcaster Aaron Hawkins. This netted me half a dozen hits, which rather surprised me. For comparison, every time Russell links to my blog here I get 100 hits very quickly on a bad day.
So I looked at Google Reader, which in those days let you see how many subscribers on the service a blog had, and he had, from memory, around 140. Kiwiblog had over 1,500. And I just couldn't see how a blog with ten times as many subscribers could have (as per Open Parachute) a fraction of the number of readers. Hits, maybe, yes. But readers, no.
But that’s just Google Reader, right? Yes and no. After I talked about this on Twitter, Whaleoil countered by saying he had 800 Feedburner subscribers. This statistic isn’t public, so I could only compare with my lowly, unranked blog, which had 600. Not a lot less. But again, a tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the readership.
So my theory is this: Whaleoil actually gets relatively few individual and meaningful unique readers for each of his post. Either that, or he has several orders of magnitude more browser bookmarkers than I do (and why would he? Makes little sense to me the behaviour of our readers would differ on such a gigantic scale). This matters because one of the key elements of the Whaleoil myth is that he had a readership comparable to that of mainstream publication. I don’t think this is remotely true.
(By the way, when I say ‘meaningful’ readers, I mean people who actually read the stuff, and who didn’t come through a link about weaponry or naked Miley Cyrus, which are some of the things he uses as Google bait. If you run a blog, you know how to tell apart real hits from the noise. And there’s a lot of noise. That’s why my only personal metric is unique returning readers on Google Analytics, and I don’t bother to be ‘ranked’ by Open Parachute. It’s just too blunt a tool. At this time, for example, it ranked The Real Steve Gray as NZ’s second most read blog. And how many Google Reader subscribers did The Real Steve Gray have? 2.)
Now since this little, very unscientific survey of mine, I think the prophecy of Whaleoil’s massive popularity has self-fulfilled to an extent, especially after his editorship at Truth and the habit that Labour party members developed to leak him stuff. But again this is largely I think magnified by the fact that people in media feel that they have to follow him. And I still think he gets a tiny fraction of the readers of, say, the Herald.