Aggregation
I’m sure that this will be of little interest to anyone remotely blog-savvy, but in the last week or so I’ve discovered (on my own behalf, I’m sure most other people already knew) rss syndication. It was something I was remotely aware of before, because I’d seen various cryptic references to it buried within the deeper nooks of Movable Type. I didn’t really know what it did, though, or how it worked, and I didn’t even realise (in any more than a vague sense) that my own blog had an rss version sitting alongside its html version all along. If you’re like me, and you’ve studiously avoided figuring out what this stuff is all about, you might like to read on. If you’re any sort of an expert on the subject, I’d advise you not to, because my summary will inevitably be full of howlers.
What an rss page does (and someone might be able to help me with definitions of rss and xml and how they overlap) is to publish your content in kind of a database format, to give other web sites access to your posts. It looks like this. It means that if someone else wanted to, for instance, they could grab the last post of your blog (to the extent that you decided to syndicate it - mine only includes an excerpt of each post) and automatically post it to theirs. Movable Type creates an rss “feed” by default, and I’m sure that other blogging software does, too. Most of the sites that I regularly look at have one.
So what all that allows me (and many others) to do is to cut down on the time spent browsing blogs that haven’t been changed, by employing an rss aggregator. That’s just a tool that goes to all the blogs that you nominate (or “subscribe to”) and grabs the latest content, to save you the trouble of opening up each webpage and having a look. I’m using one called Bloglines, which does all its work online, but there are others that you can download and run locally. Bloglines goes and checks all the feeds every hour, so it means I can open up the page with all my subscriptions and see at a glance which ones have been updated. It saves a lot of forlorn clicking to infrequently-updated blogs, and gets you straight to where the action is.
On the one hand, this has saved me a fair bit of time. As my list of daily blogs has expanded, an increasingly large slice of my morning has been devoted to checking the traps. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to just whack any blog with an rss feed onto the list, so whereas the old system was some degree self-limiting, this one might open the floodgates. But let’s face it - if one weren’t already an addict, one wouldn’t be here …
Fare Delusions
From The Age today:
Detected fare evasion on Melbourne’s public transport rose 42 per cent in the past financial year and the Government estimates that between 10 and 15 per cent of passengers are fare evaders - at a cost of $50 million a year.
It’s a bit hard to know what these figures mean. I find it a bit hard to believe that fare evasion is that low - most tram journeys that I go on, only a minority of people seem to be validating tickets. If detected fare evasion rises, is that because there’s more effort going into detection, or is it because there’s more fare evasion? The article says that “Victorian Government figures suggest the private operators and the Government are cracking down on fare evasion, that patronage is growing at about 3 per cent a year and ticket revenue at about 6 per cent”. But this sounds dodgy. If they’re only prepared to make an estimate as to the number of fare evaders, how is it that they’re able to make this comparison? Presumably “patronage” includes fare evaders, so how are the patrons counted? If they’re calculating patronage from a random sample, then are their figures for ticket revenue calculated the same way?
Whatever the case, and even if we accept the Government’s figures as being correct, it still seems to me that $50 million a year could pay for a lot of tram conductors. (The figure is an estimate from all public transport, so it includes fare evasion on trains, but it’s my guess that compliance is much higher on trains because of the ticket barrier systems at major stations). I don’t know how many trams there are in Melbourne, and I don’t know what salary a tram conductor would get, but it’s easy enough to do some guesswork. Let’s say a tram conductor would get $40,000 a year. That would mean that for $50 million you could get 1,250 of them. Is that enough to cover Melbourne’s tram network? I would think so, probably with some left over to help deal with the trains as well.
Admittedly, if it’s true that fare evasion is being reduced, then the figures could eventually weigh in favour of the ticket machines and inspectors rather than the conductors. But then, having conductors on board trams could only make them more attractive to fare-paying patrons, because of improved safety and customer service.
I always pay my fare on the tram, and I don’t like it when other people don’t. It seems to me that the public transport system is fragile enough without users trying to take free rides. Having said that, though, it seems to me that the overzealous cost-cutting that went along with privatisation has left us with a ticketing system that’s a joke, so it’s hardly surprising that a proportion of people are going to treat it as such. You don’t have to be a genius to look at the way trams work in this city and see that there’s only one way to ensure fare compliance. That is, to have a person with a leather bag hanging around their waist selling and checking tickets. On a bus, you can have people filing through one door past a driver who checks tickets, but to try and implement that sort of system on Melbourne trams would be a disaster - the city would grind to a halt. In the city during rush hour, it’s quite common to have scores of people flocking onto a tram, and forcing them into an orderly queue would be hopeless, not only because there are so many of them and it would take so long but because the tram behind can’t get past while all this happens. The ticketing process needs to take place once the trip is underway, and it’s just ridiculous to suppose that it’s going to happen effectively under a pseudo-honour system staffed by unfriendly, unreliable machines and enforced by the occasional blitz from ticket inspectors hunting in packs, whose impeccable customer service training can’t conceal their delight in having recourse to draconian powers of detention. It was never going to work, it’s not working, and it’s about time that this particular strain of automation fetishism was allowed to die a natural death.
Rambling on Gambling
Mark Latham’s saving plan has sparked off a fair bit of discussion about the causes of poverty. It’s a sensitive subject, and it’s a shame that the ALP policy couldn’t have been channeled through a more delicate spokesman (as endearing as Latham’s straightforwardness might sometimes be). Predictably enough, Latham trod all over the sensivities with his statements about poor people wasting money on gambling and cigarettes and alcohol. If you were going to try and list the many problems that contribute to poverty, those things would probably have to be on the list, but so would the problem of stigmatisation, which Latham’s comments could only make worse.
Wayne Wood thinks that the best way to alleviate poverty is to increase “financial literacy”, thus empowering poor people to make better investment decisions. It seems to me that both Mark and Wayne are presuming that the poor have extra income to invest, and the fact that they’re still poor is down to the fact that they invest badly. Obviously, before all these questions (whether to smoke, whether to drink, whether to gamble, whether to buy shares, whether to start a nest-egg) can arise, there has to be some discretionary money available. It depends how you define poverty, but on my reading, impoverished people are by definition those who (generally through unemployment) couldn’t afford to take advantage of either Mark’s idea or Wayne’s. I think both ideas have merit, but their application would be to people who are already, by virtue of having that discretionary income, somewhat off the bottom of the poverty heap. I suspect that there’s a tendency to include anyone who doesn’t own a house amongst society’s impoverished. It could be that the housing boom might have left we recalcitrant renters looking bad on paper, but my lifestyle and surroundings certainly don’t accord with my understanding of what poverty is supposed to look like, and I don’t regard my financial circumstances (as modest as they are) as a problem needing to be solved.
Gambling is a big problem, which I’ve written about before. It seems to be more of a problem among poor people than rich people. I don’t think it’s because they’re stupid, or because they lack discipline. I think they’re just a bit more vulnerable to the lies of the gambling industry. The idea of going home from a night at the pokies with a big win means a lot more to someone who didn’t have much money to start with. With that in mind, maybe it would be a good idea if the first few weeks of Wayne Wood’s financial literacy curriculum were devoted to gambling education. That is to say, not lectures on the evils of gambling, but just information about what it is and how it works, to empower people to make intelligent decisions about how to spend their money. When I was in high school, I spent a couple of days at a maths conference. Don’t ask me how I ended up there, because as a maths geek I made a great music geek, but I did. I can’t remember any of it, except for one session, which was a lecture given by a guy from the Adelaide Casino, going through the mathematics of the various games and how it all worked and how the casino made money. I’ve almost never gambled since (apart from the obligatory poker sessions with friends, where the odds tend to change according to the inebriation of the other players). It’s not that I think it’s evil or wrong or even particularly stupid, it’s just that I understand that if I was to do it often enough, I’d certainly lose money, so it’s better to do it seldom if at all. I know that when the odds are structured in a certain way, the more bets you have the greater the likelihood that the outcome will reflect those odds. You can see what I’m talking about from this simulation. It rolls four dice and adds the numbers together, and plots each result on a graph representing all the possible outcomes (from 4 to 24). You can see that when the applet first starts, you can get some bizarre results on the graph at the bottom, but the longer you let it run, the more it takes on a shape that’s representative of the actual odds. You’ve got more chance of rolling a 14 than anything else (I think), because you’ll get that by rolling 6-1-6-1 or 4-3-4-3 or 2-5-2-5 or whatever, whereas there’s only one way, 1-1-1-1, to wind up with a 4. If this was a casino game, the odds would be structured on the correct assumption that, over thousands of repetitions, the results are going to form that nice Gaussian curve. If you placed a million different bets of a dollar, the casino would certainly win. If you placed only one bet of a million dollars, however, the casino might have cause to sweat a little. I suspect that if you showed this simulation to a serial gambler, and explained it so that she could understand it (which almost certainly means doing a better job than I’ve done here), she’d think twice about heading straight to the 1c pokie machines.
I argued once before that every pokie should have the odds printed on the front of it, so that punters could compare them meaningfully to each other, and to provide a balance to all the “Win Win Win” messages that they get bombarded with when they walk into the venue. Something along the lines of: “Over time, for every dollar that gets put into this machine, 85 cents comes out.” Perhaps a similar thing could be put on Lotto tickets. Something like “If you and your friend each picked a name at random from the Melbourne telephone directory, you would have more chance of picking the same name than you would of winning this lottery.”
It all might be pointless, though, unless it was backed up with some sort of education that allowed people to get their head around matters of chance and probability. When I used to work on the ship, the crew club used to run a cash lottery. They’d sell tickets, and the whole of the proceeds from ticket sales would go back into the prize pool. In other words, it was a neutral bet - if you bought enough tickets enough times, you’d end up even. Much better odds than a poker machine or a roulette wheel, and much much better odds than a normal lottery. What they found, though, is that most people wouldn’t buy a ticket until the prize pool reached a certain amount. Any less than about $1000, and they’d say “It’s not worth it.” I tried to explain that a 1 in 10 chance of winning $10 was the same as a 1 in 100 chance of wining $100 or a 1 in 1000 chance of winning $1000, but it all fell on deaf ears. If they couldn’t imagine themselves pocketing a big enough swag of cash, they weren’t interested. All of which leads me to the long-winded conclusion that gambling education should go beyond “What are you really gambling with?”, and ask “What are you really gambling for?”
Armchair Archaeology
Inspired by Angus, I’ve been digging around in the the first edition 1966 Melway street directory, which the publishers have scanned and put online. It’s interesting for a reasonably recent resident like me to look at the maps and imagine life before CityLink and the Westgate Bridge. It’s the intimate details of my immediate area that are more diverting, though.
When I first moved to Melbourne, I lived in this shitty, mouse-infested, damp-ridden block of flats:
I was in the ground floor flat at the front, just behind the pedestrian in the blue jacket, the place with the broken venetian blinds that give it that derelict-building chic. Incidentally, you wouldn’t recognise the place if you drove past today - it’s been gutted and renovated and rendered and fenced in. I’m sure it will cost double the rent - I can only hope that they were able to gentrify the mouse colony out of existence. When I moved, I only went around the corner, so this area is still very much my backyard. You can see on the right of the picture the edge of Gilpin Park, a large expanse of paddock with a jogging track and a dispenser for complimentary dogshit bags (in spite of which the park also boasts a decent quota of complimentary dogshit).
Here’s the area on the 1966 Melways (rotated 90 degrees clockwise, for reasons that will become obvious):
My old block of flats sits right where the “O” is on “Pearson St”. In 1966, clearly, its location would have been even less glamorous than its construction. Backing onto a meadow full of faeces is one thing. Backing onto a council tip is another. (Note that, even in the first edition, the Melway was incredibly detailed - it not only has the tip, but also lists the opening hours!) Actually, I knew in advance of seeing this map that Gilpin Park used to be a tip, because I have a friend, one of the jazz tragics who I see at every other gig, who used to be a telegram boy in Brunswick, so he knows every nook and cranny from Lygon Street to Melville Road. There are lots of these ex-landfill parks around Melbourne (and probably elsewhere), but they’re usually pretty easy to identify by the presence in each of a singularly large grassy knoll. Kiddies run up to the summit and roll down the sides, and who wouldn’t, except someone who was discomfited by the notion of rubbing the whole of his body over decades of accumulated household refuse? Gilpin Park, though, has no mound. So what happened to all the extra rubbish? To find the answer, I had to dig through to another layer of the internet archives, this time courtesy of AusPottery.com, which features this great aerial photo of the area in the 1930’s:
The street running along the bottom of the picture is Pearson Street. The road running up the centre of the picture is Albert Street, which runs along the left hand side of the tip on the Melway map. It’s fairly easy to see that, in the spot where the tip ended up being, there’s a bloody great hole in the ground. Over on the right hand side of the picture you can just see the chimneys of the Hoffman Brickworks (which are still there, now the centrepiece of another residential development). The big holes are the clay pits, where they got the clay to make the bricks. The industrialisation of Brunswick, as it happened, was driven by the fact that it happened to sit on a whole lot of good brickmaking clay. The hole on the left side of Albert Street presumably became the Brunswick Tip (which had closed, as you can see from the Melways, by 1966), and the hole on the right side became the Melbourne City Council Tip (bloody inner city snobs exporting their garbage to the working-class suburbs). Of course, having dug those big pits, it only made sense to fill them up with rubbish, and having filled them up with rubbish, it only made sense to detoxify them to the extent that grass would grow and then let dogs walk on them. It’s only surprising that they stopped filling the pits when they were full, instead of extending the landfill aboveground like happened in so many other spots. The left-hand rubbish tip eventually became sporting fields, and the right-hand one became Gilpin Park. Here’s a picture taken from Gilpin Park last year, with the brickworks’ chimneys in the background surrounded by the new housing development:
I was impressed when I found out that some guy had identified new comets by downloading satellite images from the internet. It represented the first time that anyone had discovered new celestial bodies without using a telescope. He must have felt great - all I’ve discovered is the fact that a couple of local parks were once rubbish tips which were once big pugholes, and I’m pretty chuffed.
Insensatez
For about four years at the end of the 90’s, I was playing at about 70 weddings a year. I’ve seen every kind of reception imaginable, from snooty black-tie Hyatt-ballroom 600-guest bonanzas to backyard barbecues. I played in golf clubs and town halls and church halls and reception centres and pubs and parks and farms and wineries and racecourses. I’ve heard every variation on the themes common to all best man speeches. I’ve seen a bride and groom erupt into a screaming argument in front of all their guests (who, incidentally, were divided along sectarian lines when it came to standing for toasts). I’ve seen a bride so drunk she couldn’t make it to the dance floor for the bridal waltz. I’ve seen a three-year-old flower girl make a point of standing in the foreground of every photograph with her lovely white dress hoisted above her head. I’ve seen many a bouquet have its trajectory interrupted by an unfortunately-placed chandelier. I’ve seen countless groups of young drunk bachelors treat the catching of the garter like a contested mark on the last line of defence. I’ve done numerous interminable renditions of “Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye” during numerous interminable guards of honour (most of which end with the groom sitting in the taxi looking at his watch as the bride spills five minutes’ worth of tears down the shoulder of each member of the congregation, including people she hasn’t met before). I guess you could say that the whole process has left me a) deeply ambivalent about weddings, and b) when it comes to playing for them, something of a reception-meister.
Last night I played at a wedding. I suspect that I was the only one in the band to have done the hard wedding yards. That’s fine - it usually just means that I’m the focus of questions about “What happens next?” (In case you’re wondering, speeches usually end with telegrams, followed by cake cutting and bridal waltzing). It can also mean that I’m called upon, from time to time, to avert disaster.
They danced their bridal dance to a CD track (”Come What May” from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, in which all I can usually hear is the mixing desk working overtime trying to match Nicole Kidman’s mousey soprano with Ewan McGregor’s big-hearted belting and an orchestration lusher than Jurassic Park). That’s not unusual, but it puts the band in a bit of an awkward position, because the sound of a live jazz band can be, well, a bit of a let-down after the sound of an 80-piece orchestra mastered to within a byte of perfection. Practically speaking, our job is to keep the dance floor full for at least a few songs, after which it’s generally time for dessert and coffee anyway. Getting the first song right is crucial.
How Insensitive by Antonion Carlos Jobim is a great song. Set to a plaintive melody which I believe Jobim nicked from Chopin, the words (at least in their English translation) tell a story which is almost unique in popular song. Obviously, there are a million songs which say “You done me wrong”, but I can think of few that say “I done you wrong”, and none as wrenchingly as this one:
How insensitive I must have seemed when he told me that he loved me. How unmoved and cold I must have seemed when he told me so sincerely. Why, he must have asked, Did I just turn and stare in icy silence? What was I to say? What can you say when a love affair is over?
Now he’s gone away, And I’m alone with a memory of his last look. Vague and drawn and sad I see it still: all the heartbreak in his last look How, he must have asked, Could I just turn and stare in icy silence? What was I to do? What can one do When a love affair is over?
Terrific stuff that never fails to give me shivers, particularly when it’s sung in that Astrid Gilberto senza vibrato which seems to capture so perfectly the staring numbness of heartbreak. I’m sure you can understand, though, why it’s not a great choice for a wedding reception, particularly in that critical second-dance-number spot. And so, as Nicole and Ewan reached their final digitally-enhanced crescendo and I glanced at the singer’s music stand to see what was up next, I was forced to exercise the reception-meister’s right of veto.
Incidentally, and as a follow up to my Jamie Oliver post, there is further evidence that I’ve been spending much too much time taking my place amongst Channel 10’s coveted 18-35 demographic. It seems that whenever I play with a singer who is somewhat liberal with the pop stylings, I have to forcibly restrain myself. As the applause dies down, I get this urge to say “That was great. But let’s see what our judges thought!”
Refurbishments
I’ve implemented a “Recent Comments” list (which, as the pedants will notice, is actually a “Recently Commented Upon” list, but I doubted that the the terminological accuracy was worth the extra four syllables). It occurred to me this morning as I was typing about my tenth contribution to a particular comment thread that I probably write more in my own comments than I do in my main posts, and that anyone who bothers to drop in to my blog at least deserves to be made aware of where the majority of my effort is being spent (if only to justify the lack of effort elsewhere). Incidentally, I think it’s worth blog authors linking to comment threads on other blogs to which they’re contributing, since it gives visitors an idea of how the author interacts in other people’s spaces. I know it happens sometimes, but too rarely imho.
To help facilitate that idea, and following what seems to be a bit of a trend, I’ve added permalinks to individual comments, to avoid the very common “Go to this entry and scroll down to comment number eleven” syndrome.
Outta My Head
Am I the only one who can’t go into the kitchen these days without my inner monologue suddenly lapsing into a Jamie Oliver dialect? Seriously. This afternoon it was “Right, now I’ve got these two minute noodles that I bought today, and wot’m gonna do is just break’m up like that, stick’m in the bowl, and just pour the boiling water over the top, yeah? Now, I’m gonna microwave them maybe two, two-an-a-’alf minutes, and they should be just lovely and soft. Now all I do, easy as pie, is just sprinkle on this seasoning, ’bout ‘alf a tablespoon of chilli sauce, and lovely jubbley. That’s gonna be just briyant.” Thanks Channel 10.
More on Me
I’ve updated my vanity page to make it a bit less embarrassingly inadequate, and to add an author photo. It came to my attention (when I was variously referred to as “the proprietor of tubagooba” and “Dan, whose surname appears to be Gordon”) that I’ve presented as a bit of a man of mystery, which was never my intention, just a degree of oversight on my part when it came to revealing personal details. I must admit, I don’t have a great time trying to sum myself up in 200 words, but I’ve given it a red hot go.
Ken on Pauline
(Apologies, Ken, if the title turns the stomach a little). Ken Parish discusses the possibility that the Pauline Hanson appeals process might have caught the Howard Government in an involuntary game of chicken. To summarise, he thinks that within reasoning provided for the decision in her recent bail hearing in Queensland’s Court of Appeal (which denied bail), there is the suggestion that, when the appeal itself is heard, the charges could be dismissed. Which means that Pauline could be free, vindicated and politically rejuvenated by Christmas. Ken sees John Howard rushing to squeeze an election in before that can happen, and if he can’t, putting the double-dissolution idea on the backburner (because One Nation might otherwise romp home with a big swag of Queensland senate seats). I suppose on Ken’s reasoning the choice would be between a snap election very soon, or a late election (September 11 next year, if one of his commenters is correct) after the furore has had time to simmer down. I’m not sure a year is long enough for Howard to gain the forgiveness (or at least the forgetfulness) of One Nation sympathisers, so maybe Ken’s right in backing the first possibility.
An interesting conjunction (at least for someone who’s studying all this stuff) between the operations of criminal law (the trial), constitutional law (double dissolution triggers) and electoral politics. Thanks to Ken for a commentary that should keep interested eyes on the ball for the next month or two.
Pendulum #3
Last week I posted some thoughts on the political colours of the blogosphere as a whole (and particularly the Australian part), and asked others to contribute. There was quite a large response, on this blog and elsewhere, but the discussion quickly took a turn towards the topic of racism, rather than addressing the question of whether there is a collective “blog bias”, and if so what form it takes. Which is fine. For what it’s worth, though, I’ve looked for responses to the original question and collated them.
By the time I excluded posts that I could make no sense of, I ended up with eight responses from seven different respondents. Many of them were at pains to point out the fact that my own perceptions of the blogosphere are skewed by my own experiences and beliefs. That always seemed quite self-evident to me. Likewise, of course, all the other respondents were writing from their own political and experiential perspectives. It was always going to be impossible to gain any objectively verifiable measure of exactly where the average blog lies politically, because everything about the discussion is inherently subjective. However, that’s not to say that, if any sort of consensus could be found between bloggers of different persuasions, that consensus would be meaningless.
Here’s my attempt to summarise the responses that I got, in so far as they relate to the question at hand. I’ve excluded any extraneous points that the respondents made at the same time (relating to bias in the media, or bias in me, general snipes at political opponents etc). All totally unscientific, of course, any anyone is free to take issue with my characterisation of their views.
Does the blogosphere sit to the right of society at large, is it representative, or does it sit to the left.
James Hamilton: Right Sedgwick: Right EvilDan: Representative (maybe slightly right) Gareth Parker: Representative (I think) Robert: Right Mark: Right (slightly?) Stewart Kelly: Representative (maybe slightly right).
No-one who responded perceived extreme bias, but the majority indicated that there was at least a slight skew to the right, including some who clearly approached the question from a right-wing perspective. Which means not very much at all, but it does mean at least that I’m not entirely alone in perceiving that you’re somewhat more likely to meet a right-winger surfing through blogdom than you are walking down the street. As for reasons why that might be, well, now I’m into entirely speculative territory. (I could hardly be doing anything but speculating on a subject like this, but I put in the disclaimer in the knowledge that some knob somewhere would otherwise undoubtedly try to assert that I was making empirical claims.)
Assuming, then, that right-wingers are more likely to become bloggers, why might that be? The first explanation that comes to mind is that the solitary nature of blogging is particularly compatible with the spirit of rugged individualism that tends to motivate right-wingers moreso than left-wingers. Bloggers, almost by definition, are disinclined to speak as a group. Every post, every comment, has a name to it, and no blogger ever (rightly) claims to be speaking for anyone but herself. It’s the publishing world’s expression of every-man-for-himself libertarianism. Everyone free to do and say exactly what they want, answerable to no-one. Even group blogs like Troppo are, when it comes down to it, a bunch of individual blogs that share the same website. None of the five authors seeks to speak for any other of the five (in fact, far from it … they’re more likely to be arguing from opposite positions, and more power to them.)
Not that left-wingers were necessarily going to feel uncomfortable with the idea of the blog, but it’s well outside the framework of collective action by which the Left has traditionally voiced its grievances. Maybe it’s not so surprising, in that context, that when the lefties went online, they were inclined to do it through vehicles like Indymedia and ZNet, which had an emphasis on organising group activism, rather than each taking to the net in his own personal crusade.
Some, like James Hamilton, asserted that the reason for the rightish slant was that the traditional media leans left, so the right takes to the blogs in an effort to shore up their ideology against the onslaught of the mainstream. This seems to imply that the right are more likely to see their views as being ignored by the mass media, which certainly hasn’t been my observation. Certainly, the pages of ZNet don’t seem to lag at all behind your average right-wing blog when it comes to complaining about the media. It’s probably characteristic of all proponents of strong political views (and probably moreso the more extreme the view gets) that they see their perspective as being hard-done-by in mainstream discourse. It’s certainly not a grievance on which the right has a monopoly.
What about demographics? Bloggers, by definition, have access to a computer and an internet connection, and at least a modicum of web literacy. Might that class of people be expected to differ from the country as a whole in the tenor of their commentary? Is blogging concentrated in particular professions? The IT profession is an obvious candidate - what does your average programmer think, and can that be disinguished from what your average schoolteacher or road digger thinks?
Also, I wonder whether there isn’t something of an excluded middle when it comes to political blogging. I mean, you can take it for granted that whoever goes to the trouble of starting a blog to write about political issues is going to feel strongly about something or other. They’re going to have some sort of message which they feel is worthwhile getting across to other people. If you were perfectly happy with the way the world works, quite contented with the status quo, why would you bother? It’s a bit like the telephone polls they do on Today Tonight - the results are a foregone conclusion, because only people who feel that an injustice has been done are going to bother picking up the phone. So maybe what you tend to get is the two extremes (not necessarily meaning extremists) lobbing grenades at each other while those in the centre are too busy watching Australian Idol to worry too much. A corollary effect of that might be that almost all bloggers are either a) preaching to the converted on their own side, or b) yelling at the deaf ears of the other side. The moderates, the ones who don’t think there is any issue so burning that it warrants an online manifesto, would probably look at both sides with a degree of bemusement.
It could well be that most bloggers (and I’m aware that I’m tending to use “bloggers” when I should say “political bloggers”, because there are plenty of great bloggers who steer clear of politics altogether, which is probably wise, but hopefully if they’ve read this far they’ll forgive my shorthand) like it the way it is. Maybe it’s all about grandstanding and head-kicking, and no-one ever really expects to exchange an idea with anyone who doesn’t already share it. Maybe the blogosphere is more like a colisseum than an agora. If that proves to be the case, then that’s fine. It’s not for me to say what it should be. In the end, if I don’t like it, I’ll be quite happy to leave it to its own devices.
I guess that last point could be seen as something of a counter to the idealised concept of blogging as the ultimate in democratic discourse, the saviour of truth from the clutches of the media tyrants, etc. Perhaps its saying that the very individualism of it, as a pursuit, means that it’s not going to accurately model an idealised process of public debate, where not only does everyone have a voice, but everyone is also able to join voices with others. Or perhaps its just a meaningless rant from someone who has been stung by a forced awakening from his naive assumption that that the inherent fallacy of racism could be taken as read.