Adios comments section

The comments section at SRBP is gone,  this time for good.

The theory was great.

People could offer their own views on your writing and then you could have an exchange of views based on mutual respect,  even if the conversation got animated.

In practice,  online comments – whether on blogs or on conventional media sites – quickly became the domain of  arseholes.  They post under a variety of fake identities and spew what most arseholes spew. More often than not the same arsehole had multiple identities to increase the quantity of mayhem.

So it is that newspapers have started to shut down the comments functions on websites.  No one will mourn their loss.

The Value of Controversy and Colleagues

Over the past few days,  one American political science blog has been at the centre of a pretty hot controversy about a post on the value of networking for younger political scientists.  Follow the links below and you’ll find further

Brian Rathbun, the author of the post quit the collective blog called The Duck of Minerva, with a short note that included this comment:

Through poorly chosen and ill-considered language and images, I made light of women’s challenges both in their academic and in their daily lives, for which I am deeply sorry.

Thankfully, someone reposted the original Rathbun piece that some found offensive. Take a moment and read it before going on with the rest of this.  Be warned the title is crude and some may find it distasteful: “Intellectual Jailbait: Hunting for Underage Ideas at APSA”.  That’s the American Political Science Association conference he’s talking about.

If you’re serious about ideas… #nlpoli

then get serious about blogging.

From the Harvard Business Review:

Writing is still the clearest and most definitive medium for demonstrating expertise on the web. But as thought leaders like Gary Vaynerchuk have shown with video blogging and fellow HBR blogger Mitch Joel with podcasting (i.e., audio blogging), as long as your content is rich and thoughtful, you can still build up a massive following and reputation regardless of your channel. In an information-hungry world, there will always be a need for expert content. And there will always be more readers and "retweeters" than there will be creators.

If you want to have an impact, you might as well be the one setting the agenda by blogging your ideas.

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10 Things for First Time Blog Writers #nlpoli

So you are thinking about starting a blog.

Great!

Before you go any further, go vote for SRBP as the Best Political Blog in Canada.  There are a couple of days left in the final voting. Go back again tomorrow and the day after.

Lives could depend on it.

When you’ve done voting, come back and read the rest of this post.

SRBP at Seven #nlpoli #cdnpoli

The Sir Robert Bond Papers turns seven years old today.

The purpose remains simple enough, as described in the first anniversary post:

While much has changed in the past year, the core goal for the Bond Papers is still the same: to contribute to an informed discussion of public policy issues. It started with the offshore and in the first few weeks that proved to be the issue that dominated.

Since then, there have been posts on everything from the fishery to alleged spy planes flying through Newfoundland and Labrador, Titan missiles and economic development. Some posts are light-hearted and humourous. Others have been deeper and wordier. Whether they succeeded in being funny or serious, as the case may be, is best left to its readers.

On the fourth anniversary, in 2009, your humble e-scribbler posted draft whistleblower legislation. 

In 2011, the anniversary post went by the wayside in favour of the daily fare:  Muskrat Falls financial problems.

This morning, your humble e-scribbler started a new short series on democracy in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

All are typical of what this corner of the Internet has become in the last seven years.  SRBP is not just about adding to the voices out there.  It’s about getting at the layers underneath.  It’s about explaining the why behind arguments and beliefs.

SRBP has also become about advocating for new initiatives.  When the province’s most popular politician Danny failed to deliver his promise of whistleblower protection, your humble e-scribbler delivered it.  Look through the archives and you’ll find all sorts of policy ideas for the fishery, the economy and education and early childhood development.

And in some areas, your humble e-scribbler has been telling you things you won;t find anywhere else.

SRBP was an immediate opponent of the Abitibi expropriation.  It was fundamentally wrong, as a matter of principle.  The government never told the full story of why the expropriated the hydroelectric properties in central Newfoundland.  Finding out that the government botched the whole thing and expropriated environmental cesspools made it only more stupid than it was at the beginning.

After a brief examination, your humble e-scribbler also became a firm opponent of Muskrat Falls.  In the year since Danny Williams announced the scheme, more people have joined the ranks of the critics and opponents.  As more people learn more, they invariably realise the project is wrong.

SRBP’s critique goes much further than just picking at bits and pieces of one small part of a much larger problem with the current administration’s policy.  Your humble e-scribbler has already proposed an alternative way to manage the province’s electricity resources that will genuinely work in the public’s best interest.

As SRBP enters its eighth year, the ultimate judge of its success or failure is you, the reader. There are many thousands more of you today than there were seven years ago.  You send e-mails, make comments on posts or in some cases, pull your humble e-scribbler aside for a quick chat.

Politicians used to make angry phone calls in 2005 to gripe about a comment or opinion.  In 2007, the Old Man took to threatening your humble e-scribbler publicly.  In 2011, his successor gave the ultimate compliment to those of us who toil online by singling us out in her year-end interviews.

All of that speaks to the fact that people are interested in what they read here.  As long as they keep coming and as long as your humble e-scribbler can keep going, the Sir Robert Bond Papers will be here.

Thank you for your support. 

Thank you for your interest.

And to each of you, every wish for a happy and prosperous and healthy New Year from your humble e-scribbler.

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Federal Liberals fear SRBP #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Well, not just the Sir Robert Bond Papers but all bloggers.

Idiots.

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Five for Friday Round-UP

To round out the week, here are five curious posts on different subjects to send you off into the weekend.

And don’t forget this Saturday* is Guy Fawkes Day.

1. Via Crooked Timber, a post at the New Statesman about the particularly abusive comments hurled at women bloggers.
2. Maybe provincial justice minister Felix Collins and his provincial Conservative colleagues should just suck it up and stop whining about the costs of the federal Conservatives’ omnibus crime bill.  After all, Felix and the gang campaigned for the harper crowd. And it’s not like the provincial Conservatives didn’t know about the crime bill before they voted.
3. This is is a practical way to promote bras.
4. One the one hand Scotiabank’s chief economist thinks everything in Newfoundland and Labrador will be ducky over the next five years.
5. And on the other hand, money is moving from commodities – like oil – into credit.  Do those two things go together?

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*  Not Sunday

Tips for Highly Effective Blogging

Via copyblogger, two posts – written a year apart – on the habits of highly effective bloggers. 

The 16 tips are pretty simple and pretty straightforward but they are as tight a summary as possible of what it takes to produce a successful blog.

• 8 habits of highly effective bloggers
• 8 more habits of highly effective bloggers

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Voting is Open Now… for NL Blogger’s Choice Awards!

If you are looking for a catalogue of local blogs there is only one place to go;  the Newfoundland and Labrador Blog Roll.

It’s the well-tended baby of Stephen Eli Harris,  a local blogger himself.

you’ll find the current blog list on the left hand side of the page.  Be warned;  it’s long.  There are lots of you out there in Newfoundland and labrador with something on your mind.  And the topics are diverse.  Everything from politics to food to babies.

While you are there, take time to check the NL Blogger’s Choice Awards and vote for the blogs you like in the different categories.  Remember:  it’s one vote per day. And you can vote every day until the end of September.

Sir Robert Bond Papers is nominated in the Political/Commentary Blogs category alongside The Fighting Newfoundlander and The Rural Lens.

towniebastard is up for the Mixed Bag category and gas and Oil is up for the Travel/Business prize.

SEH managed to pick out three blogs based on his criteria of design, longevity and frequency of posting.  It is an honour to be in the running but when you check the three competitors in this category, you will see, the choice will be tough.

A vote for these humble e-scribbles would be greatly appreciated.

And don’t forget, the national blog awards are coming up next month.

So vote, early, vote often and if you are so inclined, vote Sir Robert Bond Papers.

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Not a Mommy Blogger…not that there’s anything wrong with that

A few weeks ago, your humble e-scribbler stumbled across St. John’s Toddler, an exceptionally well done local blog by Erika Pittman. 

While it has ben very successful, it was pretty easy to see this blog deserved some wider exposure so I offered Erika this space with no restrictions.  She responded with the piece below.  It introduces the blog and Erika in a simple, frank way.

Then again, that’s what “mommy blogs”  usually are and why they have turned into both a popular form of online expression and a market force in the United States. Mom’s who blog are just one of the many way’s women express themselves online. 

If you want to see just how potent that market segment is, check out BlogHer:

Today, BlogHer is the largest community of women who blog: 25+ million unique visitors per month (Nielsen NetRatings). Engaged, influential and info-savvy, these women come to BlogHer to seek and share advice, opinions and recommendations. BlogHer’s team works hard to bring you the best and brightest conversations, writers and speakers – online and in person. That’s what we do best.

Engaged.  Engaging.  Info-savvy.  That’s pretty much what Erika’s blog is and influential is what we’d predict St. John’s toddler will become.

Enjoy!

EGH

_____________________________________________________________________

by Erika Pittman

I began writing St. John’s Toddler when I was on maternity leave two years ago. I was disappointed in the lack of local information about activities and services available to parents of young children in St. John’s. When I went to the internet in search of local activities and events for children it was hit or miss and most of the activities and services I knew about came from word of mouth. It seemed counter-intuitive to me that you already needed to know what you were looking for in order to Google it, so I started my blog.

St. John’s Toddler is not a ‘mommy blog’ in the typical sense. My intent in the beginning was simply to gather toddler-related information all in one spot. As the blog has grown that scope has expanded slightly, but it is still not a personal blog. I do a daily post, usually focusing on activities, products, events, services, or sometimes I just share a link I found useful. The common theme is parenting children under five years old in St. John’s. I chose to focus on that age group because, at this point anyway; that is my area of expertise. My son turns three this year.

Since the beginning I have tried to encourage people to send in their tips, ideas and reviews because I didn’t want this blog to be about me and my life. The whole personal blogging thing makes me uncomfortable in some ways; I can't seem to get over the 'all about me' thing or the sharing my life with strangers part.  That being said, I have noticed that the posts that are slightly more personal get the most feedback. For example, people were really interested in sharing their experiences and the challenges of taking their toddlers to restaurants after I wrote about which St. John’s restaurants I felt were toddler-friendly. Another interesting thing about the feedback I get is that a good portion of the email I get is from women new to St. John’s looking for things to do with their kids and how to meet other moms and children. I think this affirms my whole reason for starting the blog and I am happy to help them.

I am happy to say that in the two and a half years since I created the blog, a little community has formed around St. John’s Toddler, with loyal readers who send tips and regularly comment. This is exactly what I was striving for. I have begun to expand the blog a little too in recent months. I now have a local family doctor who contributes articles. I hold contests with prizes I buy myself or are generously donated by local businesses. I created an Amazon St. John’s Toddler bookstore for books that my readers or I recommend and I have set up a Twitter account.

This month I am holding the first St. John’s Toddler event; a children’s clothing swap. I am hoping this event will be an opportunity to take the St. John’s Toddler community from the virtual world to the real world and I am looking forward to meeting people I have been talking to by email for years.

I am not sure what will become of  St. John's Toddler when my child turns five, but I have a feeling the content and audience for St. John's Kid and particularly  St. John's Teen will be easy to find!

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15 minutes to write a good blog post

One of the wonderful things about modern communication tools is that you can find a wonderful link early on an otherwise dreary Monday morning.

That’s what happened yesterday.

“How to write a blog post in 5 steps and 15 minutes” is a handy guide to doing exactly as the title states.  If you do not write blog posts, this guide still has useful information.  It is well worth the few minutes it will take you to read the post from start to finish.

Be warned:  this is a guide to writing the post.

Research is the bit that takes longer and it is research and preparation that will set your post apart from the millions of others people might read on any particular day..  The tweet that carried the link to this post said that you can write in 15 minutes if you know what you are talking about.

That’s the key point.

You have to know the subject before you start writing. 

All too often writers sit down and bang away at the keyboard or – as the old folks recall – stare at the blank sheet of paper.  Worse for the reader, they start clacking away like someone possessed.  The result can be something that is the mental equivalent of the world’s supply of yarn piled up randomly in a single spot:  it does come to an end but only after going around and over and back again.

If you take the time to organize your thoughts and gather some facts or other information to support your argument, the actual writing can be pretty short.

One link inside the “15 minutes” post you should follow is this one to a list of the 18 types of posts that get the most reader attention.  Both the writing post and the list post are an example of one or more of the types.  See if you can figure out which ones they are.

Here’s an extra tip:  carry a notebook. Almost 18 months ago, your humble e-scribbler stopped collecting notes on scraps of paper and started writing things down in a notebook. 

It’s a Piccadilly, very similar to the Moleskine but far less expensive.  The cover on the spine is cracked and the whole thing is now lashed together with some stylish shiny black duct tape.  That just adds to its character.

For writing, there’s a Parker IM fountain pen:  inexpensive at about $30 and hardy enough to take being dropped or stuffed into a briefcase or rucksack.  With a bottle of ink, you are always ready no matter where you are and no matter what you are doing when an idea strikes.  Pencils, ballpoints or rollerball pens would do just as nicely.

What you write with and where you write isn’t as important as the fact you take notes, jot down ideas, and do whatever it will take to go back to the notebook later and craft a post based on your jottings.

Now if only writing a tweet quickly so that it didn’t get misunderstood was half as easy…

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Quoteworthy

“Blogging’s like sex cos: to do it well u need to do it frequently, really enjoy it and take careful note of feedback.”

Tweet by Paul Waugh, deputy political editor at the London Evening Standard, quoted in a post at Left Foot Forward.

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Gushue on blogs

Over at John Gushue’s Telegram column, you’ll find some wise advice and observations about blogs and blogging.

John’s been the force behind what may well be the province’s longest running and certainly the best blog: dot, dot,dot.  You’ll find John’s eclectic work in a link in the ‘Sir Robert Recommends’ pile on the left of by simply clicking here.  no one will be surprised to know that John is typically the most popular out-link from these parts.  People like to head from here to there and frankly, there really isn’t a finer place to go.

As John notes in the title of his post, blogging isn’t likely to be a source of income.  If you think blogging will make money or even bring in some business for you, that may depend on the market where you are.  Around these parts, blogging isn’t a money making proposition.

There are probably as many reasons for writing a blog as there are people writing.  Blogging is a personal thing, after all. John makes that point in several ways.

Take a look around the Internet and you can find a variety of blogs covering everything from hobbies to technology to politics.  If people are doing it or interested in it, then there is a blog out there somewhere about it.

That’s really the amazing thing about the Internet.  People can express themselves freely using whatever talents they have.  Some people may chose to be complete twits.  That’s fine: for every one of them, there is at least one like the people over there who Sir Robert Recommends.

If you’ve been thinking about blogging, just jump in.  The world can use more people like you online.

Just make sure you read John Gushue’s top-notch advice first.

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Good one there, Wente

Margaret Wente argues that bloggers are mostly male and demonstrates in the process that her argument [as to why that is so] is wrong.

[Sarah and I believe the urge to blog is closely related to the sex-linked compulsion known as male answer syndrome. MAS is the reason why guys shoot up their hands first in math class. MAS also explains why men are so quick to have opinions on subjects they know little or nothing about.]

Clearly, basing your column on an inherently fragile, sexist stereotype demonstrates that blogs aren’t the only place for instant, ill-founded opinions.  Moreover,  the time it takes to produce a column versus a blog post doesn’t -  in and of itself  - improve the quality of the thought behind the column.

Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes.

Maybe not, Peg, but apparently at least one is interested in taking longer to get to the same place.

But don’t worry, plenty of bloggers wind up generating exactly this kind of writing:  an argument that defeats itself.

At least Peg doesn’t have to write her own sock puppet comments.

-srbp-

[] denotes additions to clarify the point for people who don’t go off and read Wente’s column.

Wente Sorted Updated:  Apparently the considerable number of women who write blogs decided Peg was full of shit, too and decided to tell her in so many far more elegant words [original links from the Globe version are live]:

"When influential women are ignorant to the numerous women's voices on the Internet, when the voices of many women are dismissed as endearing, cute and girly, and when the voices of those women who are most oppressed are ignored altogether, that gender gap is perpetuated. Thank you, Margaret, for proving your own point about how hard it is to change the conversation."

Changing the conversation is very hard to do.

So the Globe has decided to have an online chat between Peg and women bloggers.  Get the popcorn.  This should be funny.

-srbp-

 

 

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Blog comments controversial?

Via Crisisblogger, you can find a link to a post on mashable.com about a brewing controversy about comments on blogs.

Seems some people making comments have been nasty:

Popular gadget site Engadget has recently shut down comments. It’s a temporary measure, it says, but the blog took it because the “tone in comments has really gotten out of hand.”

Quel horreur, indeed.

Anyone running any local website of any kind knows the trouble of not only cleaning off the scorch-marks from the site but trying to keep the vicious little buggers from setting all sorts of flaming bags of dog-turd alight in the first place.  The Telegram site and cbc.ca/nl have all had their share of comment wars. 

There is no full-proof method short of closing off comments altogether.  Your humble e-scribbler shut down comments for the longest time.  Then it seemed like a good idea to open them up with varying ways of making sure people took some responsibility for their words. 

The system in place right now is mostly based on the honour system and for the most part it seems to work.  There are Chinese and Philipino spammers who sometimes get through but they get deleted as soon as they are found.  Comments that add nothing to a discussion are very rare.  The most recent spurt happened over the weekend but that lasted only a few hours.  Cleaning up the mess was simple.

The most remarkable thing about SRBP is that the people who do comment manage to remain respectful and generally offer some thoughtful input.  The exchanges may get heated but for the most part things remain civilized. There is no magic formula that others may copy that just seems to be the way.

And SRBP isn’t unique in that respect.  You can find a great many Internet spaces locally and nationally where the comments sections offer input that is sometimes more significant than the stuff in the post itself that sparked the given conversation.

Now aside from the spammers, everyone is familiar with plants.  For the most part, they are easy to spot and they really don’t cause much of an issue.  Any audience is usually savvy enough to tell which comments come from real people and which comments are from a script.

Interestingly enough, there doesn’t seem to be much online comment about blog-writers who pen their own sock puppet  -that is, planted - comments apparently in an effort to make their space seem more interesting or popular than it is.

The phenomenon certainly exists.

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The Written Word Round-up

1.  Rewriting the rules of defamation.  The Supreme Court of Canada hands down a landmark ruling on two defamation cases and in the process changes the country’s defamation rules.

The defence will operate in favour of the media outlet, “if it can establish that it acted responsibly in attempting to verify the information in a matter of public interest,” Chief Justice McLachlin wrote.

“The public interest test is clearly met here, as the Canadian public has a vital interest in knowing about the professional misdeeds of those who are entrusted by the state with protecting public safety,” Chief Justice McLachlin said. "The defendants' liability therefore hinges on whether they were diligent in trying to verify the allegations prior to publication, and it will be for the jury at a new trial to decide whether the articles met this standard of responsibility.”

2.  But did he have to ask where he left his own sock puppets?  A Quebec writer reveals that she has been writing a blog under a male nom de plume and doing better at it financially than under her own name.

3. But how will the great unwashed masses know what is true if reporters and editors do not tell them?  Yet another conventional journalist raises questions about the wild and uncontrolled world of the Internet:

Seeing as how information dissemination has become so easy, a lot of information might reach millions of people unfiltered. While this provides a great opportunity for the truth to reach millions, we may also be flooded by faulty, incomplete and outright wrong information, as well as malicious attack and some plain lies.

Amazingly enough people might cope just as they have coped with “faulty, incomplete and outright wrong information” in the conventional media.  Heck, they might even find stories that never get covered at all by the conventional media even though they are entirely true.

They might even manage to find a personal relationship with accurate information that does not require the intervention of self-appointed High Priests.

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The Curious Drop Two: site design and content?

Some people left interesting comments on why some local news websites have experienced apparent traffic drops over the past 12 months or so.

Another comment came on Friday as an aside in a conversation.  Maybe it was tied – as the suggestion went – to the change at the vocm.com website.

Nope.

The start of the drop predates the change-over, although the drop seems to accelerate somewhat after July 2009.  The website changed some time in June.

And that wouldn’t explain the corresponding – although less severe  - drop at the Telegram.  The Telegram has also changed its website content over time, adding some blog space and bumping up its “breaking” news space to the point where you can sometimes get one line virtually all of what will eventually appear in the next day’s print edition.

That should have produced an uptick in traffic, especially from news junkies who will click the three local sites to see what is going on right now.  That’s likely what the Telly editors thought when they went down the road.  More eyeballs can and should produce an upward trend in readership and that helps sell more hard copies.  It should also help boost revenue from advertising online.

Now the other part of the VO conversation was a comment that the site is appalling.  Yes it is, agreed your humble e-scribbler.  It is an assault on the eyeballs, for the most part. 

The news content is also curiously presented, as labradore noted on Friday.  A story on the by-election in Terra Nova features a giant odd-angled shot of Hisself.  it’s got the “WTF-I-never-knew-you-were-behind-me” look to it. Good on Linda or whoever it was for carrying on the fine Scott Chafe tradition of getting the flag in the shot, too.

If the site change didn’t cause the drop, it sure as hell didn’t arrest the development.

The whole thing is rather curious.

And the cogitation on it continues here and  - very likely – at the newsrooms involved as well.

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The curious drop

Take a break from all the kerfuffle in the universe and take a look at some interesting statistics on two local media websites that anyone can find using Google trends.

These are 2008 daily unique visitor figures for vocm.com and thetelegram.com.

 

These are the 2009 figures for the same sites.

Now if you can’t quite pick out those numbers, be assured that they have dropped. The Telly website has dropped from an average of over 3,000 unique visitors per day to something around 2,000 by rough estimate while at VOCM, the daily traffic has dropped by about half.  It’s gone from over 6,000 unique visitors per day to as few as 3,000 in early October.

For those who don’t know, the Telly is the province’s major daily newspaper.  VOCM is the flagship of Steele Communications.  The company is the province-wide commercial radio entity, operating both AM and FM outlets across the province.

Now without access to listener data for VOCM or more current daily subscription data for the Telegram, it’s hard to know if this is unique or part of an overall pattern of decline in audience. 

In 2008, the Telly was showing about 22,000 paid subscribers each the weekday and 41,000 for the Saturday edition. The company axed its Sunday edition in 2008 and at the time of its demise, the Sunday paper was pulling no more readers than the weekday editions.  That may have boosted the Saturday numbers somewhat subsequently but it would still be a far cry from the 60-odd thousand and more the Telly used to print a decade and more ago.

Things are not any better at the Mother Corp.  The figures below are for the main cbc.ca site, not the local version, but the numbers are not encouraging either.

At the national level, the mighty Ceeb is having a bit of a problem of its own.  It’s online audience has fallen from somewhere around 150, 000 uniques a day down half that much or less in 2009 (below.  

Now there’s no big analysis here.  This is just one of those things your humble e-scribbler noticed in passing and then filed away to think about. That’s the way online writing actually happens:  it’s a work in progress and many times thinking evolves over time.  If it really works people can bring ideas to the table, and in the mix of discussion new ideas emerge.

That’s really one of the big strengths that online writing on current affairs has over all traditional media.  It really can become much more of a collaborative experience or a shared experience of discovery and understanding. 

Maybe that’s where this will lead, to an examination of the local media websites and the impact online writing has had on some aspects of local news media.  Maybe it will lead somewhere else.

In any event,  this is some of the curious information that sometimes pops up.  What it means will be something for another day.

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The Blog versus the Lobby: a U.K. perspective

Here’s a short piece in which Paul Staines a.k.a Guido Fawkes looks at the difference between his online work and the journalists who cover politics for the mainstream media.

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Vote early! Vote Bond!

The first round of voting for the Canadian Blog Awards is underway!

Click on the big picture of Sir Robert and you'll go straight to the main page. Bond Papers is nominated under Best Blog and Best Political Blog.

You can also click this massive banner right here and wind up in the same spot.

Remember, it's only one vote per category so vote early, vote wisely and harass your friends to vote as well.

The are some great blogs to vote for, including Craig Welsh's Townie Bastard.  Craig has blazed trails in the Great North and his blog is a fine example of his considerable writing talent.

Wally Maclean's labradore is also worth your vote consideration.  He's had a huge impact locally.  Sometimes it seems his blog doesn't get the attention it deserves directly but you'd be surprised at the number of places his stuff shows up.  That's because it is solidly researched.  If you want a fact or want something straightened, check labradore.

Take your time, though and go through the categories.  You can also find links to each blog on the bottom of each category page if you need some time to make up your mind.

Just get out there and vote and to all those who vote Bond, thanks so much for your support.

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