An update from the Media140 conference in Sydney where I’ve been for the past two days.

Interesting ideas and discussion and for me very pleasing to see that some journalists and media organisations  actually get “it”, without going overboard to claim that journalism is dead – but doesn’t know it’s a corpse – in the way that many social media evangelists twitter on about.

This is just a holding post with some highlights and a link to Jay Rosen’s speaking notes.

Jay Rosen is a professor at NYU and one of the world’s leading social media evangelists (IMHO). He’s just about to start on a feed via Skype, so I’ll be back with a review when he’s finished.

Mark Colvin’s speech about Twitter and Iran

ABC News report

Barry Saunders’ blog on Malcolm Turnbull’s presentation

I’m at #media140 in Sydney, the keynote this morning was ABC managing director Mark Scott. He outlined some interesting innovations for legacy media wanting to get on the Twitterverse bandwagon.

He started with the 4Ts: Telegraph, Telephone, Typewriter, Twitter. An interesting geneaology of communications technologies.

Scott noted that the 4Ts have always been about short, sharp reports of breaking news; particularly the generation of good headlines. He talked about how the ABC is moving quickly to embrace social media with the appointment of a coordinator of social media to formalise the ABC’s presence across all social networking sites.

The ABC is also today releasing its guidelines for staff using social media. The four guiding principles are really about brand protection and like the NYT are designed not to give guidance for journalists using social media as  tool, but more about social media as a distribution network:

1. Don’t mix professional and personal social media views in a way that will bring the ABC into disrepute
2. Don’t undermine your effectiveness as work
3. Don’t imply ABC endorsement for personal views
4. Do not disclose confidential information

Nothing here about journalistic ethics.

Scott made a good point about sharing information and allowing audiences to distribute ABC content. Setting up a number of widgets for people to embed on Facebook and blogs etc is obviously good business sense.

The ABC’s also launching ABC Open as a “digital town square” and part of this is training UGC providers in 50 locations to generate content.

This is the pro-am model and as Scott mentioned there has to be journalistic leadership, but also recognising that the audience is often closer to the story – at least in the initial stages.

The catchphrases are collaboration; conversation, communication and partnerships.

More later when I’ve had time to digest this and get my hands on some more notes.

Julie Posetti also argued that this is a revolution, not a war, but no doubt there will be casualties.

Thanks to Jess for alerting me to this.

Whanganui Mayor and inveterate loudmouth bully Michael Laws is at it again. This time he’s outrageously demanding the the “underclass” be sterilised.

This was the kind of ethnic cleansing policy followed by the Nazis in the 1930s and look where that got us. It’s also a popular battle cry amongst modern fascists of the BNP and White Power varieties.

But who is Laws speaking for? He as asked to define underclass by a Dominion Post reporter and this was his reply:

“A group of people who have no stake in our society, who are certainly welfare dependent, who have alcohol and drug problems and usually are criminals or consort with criminals.”

This to me could just as easily describe a bunch of Auckland property developers, wastrel socialites and finance company executives.

I’ve always felt that there’s a huge conflict of interest between Laws’ role as mayor of a major New Zealand city and his constant yabbering on the radio and in the Sunday papers.

Take this gem – Laws explaining why there are so few female executives:

Because feminism has allowed us to have our cake and eat it too. We get the sassy, sexually liberated sheilas who fulfil body and mind. But they also pull the ambition pin when their hormones kick in and they want kids.

And men do know women’s guilty secret. That they like being maternal, no matter how many letters after their name.

Why it’s great to be a guy [like Michael Laws]

Though, I do like this piece of honest self-reflction from the dribblejaws enthusiast:

READERS WILL appreciate that I’m not a particularly “deep” person. I am my gender, and despite the occasional philosopher or mystic, we males are a superficial lot. Which explains the eternal attraction of the bimbo with boobs.

Organ strife dead wrong

In this piece, about why it’s right to be an organ donor, Laws calls Maori party co-leader Tariana Turia a “racist” and then gets onto one of his favourite hobby-horses “special treatment” for Maori and Pasifika communities:

Cultural silliness from Maori and Pacific Island folk, that there’s something inherently righteous about going to the grave with all your God-given bits. And yet they are first in the queue to accept organs when required.

And the dog-whistle one-liner that follows like a stinking turd of a punchline:

There must be times when New Zealanders get bold enough to challenge the superstitious or silly excesses of other cultures.

That’s right Maori  and Pacific Island “folk” [condescending ass] you are NOT New Zealanders. Go figure, you were here first and whupped whitey’s ass in a war, but you are not of this place. And Laws thinks Ms Turia is a racist. This really is the spotless white kettle calling the pot “brown”.

Laws is the champion of not heeding his own advice. This from a recent column:

ALL MEN have fantasies. I’d like to write “all men and women”, but I’m being PC this week. I am excluding any satire/humour/mocking of any group that is not white, middle-aged, male and middle-class.

Behind every weak man is a successful Amazon

What a [Rodney] Hide this man’s got. First, his columns are rarely funny and there’s no discernable satire. and Laws is the first to attack the wobbly concept of “PC” – notice it’s our enemies, not our friends who refer to us this way. This is one of those dreadul “Shit, I’ve got a deadline and nothing to write about” columns where the panic-stricken writer falls back on family and friends and mocks loved ones. A crime against column-writing and a waste of space in any newspaper.

Another such effort surfaced around the annual boobs-on-bikes parade when Laws sought intellectual justification for his sordid pervy peculiarities:

It is sleazy, noisy and attracts every adolescent oink within 50km. But, gee, it’s fun. Heterosexual men love it because it allows a man to do what a man does best - to ogle the unobtainable.

Boobs

Even when he’s praising a woman – his choices are pretty feral – he can’t resist the ogle factor:

I’VE NEVER known what to make of Christine Rankin. She is not simply a polarising personality (thus drawing my instant empathy), but she has this unique style. All legs and cleavage.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate legs and cleavage: dear Lord, I’m a middle-aged heterosexual male. Appreciation is about all you get to do. And there are obviously some men in the public service who got to perv at much closer proximity.

Christine Rankin’s a champion

That’s enough. I could go on, but the truth this Michael Laws has not contributed anything to the advancement of Kiwi culture through his columns. He’s a loud-mouth who delights in offending. I suppose you could argue he’s the consumate “shock-jock”, others might say he’s a simple wanker.

It’s time to retire Mike, you’re boring us to tears.

Two brief comments this morning about the Sunday news agenda.

Firstly, why is stuff.co.nz featuring two stories designed to get a rise out of Sunday morning male readers?

One is an inadvertent advert for Penthouse magazine and the other an advertisment for the Gold Coast SuperGP motor racing dressed up as a soft(core) news story.

The news value in these items is miniscule to non-existent. Only one has a local angle (the woman is a Kiwi, but appeared in the “Aussie Babes” pages of the magazine), but the “wow” factor is high — both feature prominent images of scantily-clad young women.

Don’t believe me that they’re adverts? Gentlemen start your engines; ladies, I’m sorry, but trust me, this is for research purposes only:

Topless teacher on Penthouse website
Miss SuperGP Gold Coast golden girl

EM tries to be a family-friendly blog (sometimes), so I’m not linking to the images, anyone over the age of 10 can imagine them from the suggestive headlines.

But this one from nzherald.co.nz is perhaps the most tittylating: Dominatrix tells of ‘bad feelings’

Phhhwhhhoaaaarrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alas, it too is no more than an advertisment – this time for Metro magazine.

Second point: After all the fuss about British Nationalist Party goon Nick Griffith’s appearance on the BBC, why is stuff.co.nz giving space to our local Nazis?

Far-right leader Kyle Chapman returns

Go figure, it must a slow news day [Labour day long-weekend in Aotearoa]  and sex sells.

Take your pick of editor’s cliched responses; I’m going back to bed.

Actually, I’m not: I’m going whale watching on Hauraki Gulf.

In the meantime, “no platform for fascists”

In science and science fiction there’s a moment when it all goes to custard for the human race. It’s the singularity – often defined as the time when machines begin to out think humans.

We’re not there yet and I’m comfortable with predictions that it might happen 200 years after my demise. But you can never really trust futurist predictions.

We’ve already got smart(ish) bots hurtling around the interWebs chewing up data and spitting it out again in a clickable and commercial form, so I’m not too sanguine about what’s gong on in the DARP labs and other murky salons where “mad” scientists and uber-smart geeks tend to gather.

Anyway, there is evidence of not-so-smart machines out there already aggregating, redacting and posting prose that fills the holes between advertising links on some remote outposts of the blogosphere.

Take, for example, Biginfo, the website with the unbeatable cyber-catchline: “All of your info, on one page”.

Isn’t that the holy grail of the Internet? Isn’t this slogan the absolute bottom-line misison statement for Google?

We won’t need humans any more if Biginfo succeeds.

I  know about Biginfo because the site has linked to a post here at Ethical Martini. As you do, I went to check out why the site was linking and pushing some traffic my way.

This is what I found:

What is More Ethical Blogs or News Media?

20 October, 2009 (15:10) | News And Society | By: admin

// your advertisement goes here

We are chance more and more that readers conceive the aggregation contained in Blogs is more trusty than the indicant programme media. (I don’t conceive a candid comparability between the electronic media and Blogs makes such sense, so my comparability is direct: cursive touchable vs. cursive material.) While I encounter this agitate in ‘believability’ to be somewhat surprising, I staleness adjudge that I don’t conceive I personally undergo anybody that reads the production without a nagging distrustfulness and a taste of doubt. Even more, I move to be astonished at the ontogeny sort of grouping I undergo that do not modify pain to feature the newspaper.

The long post goes on in this vein for some depth. Here’s another of my favourite paras:

I module substance digit appearance on the supply of blogs vs. newspapers. A blogger, aforementioned me, is attractive the instance to indite most an supply that I poverty to indite most and that I see passionately about. Question: so, what most the mortal of ethics? Answer: I do not hit a deadline, I hit no application that is biased, and I modify intend to indite my possess headline!

I am willing to believe that this is a machine-translation of something written in another language (possibly Chinese?) by a blogger or someone and that in it’s original iteration it makes great sense. Also, if it had been translated by a moderately proficient human it would probably also be readable and cogent.

Are we redundant? Should we retreat and leave the web to dribblejaws who find it a convenient medium to feed their conspiracy theories and ugly prejudice?

I certainly hope not, continue reading if you’d like to know more about the singularity.

Convergence culture—a moment of singularity?

Welcome to the brave first decade of the twenty-first century, a decade which will destroy more science fiction futures than any ten year span that preceded it.

Charles Stross, Toast

In an introduction to Toast, his collection of short stories, science fiction writer Charles Stross writes that a “fogbank of accelerating change” seems to “swallow our proximate future”. He also writes that the pace of change in the period from the late 1960s to the present has been faster than at any other time in history. He adds that today “if anything, it’s accelerating” and that technological change is “one-way”. There’s no going back. Stross speculates, as sci-fi writers are encouraged to do, that the world may be heading towards what mathematician and computer scientist Vernor Vinge describes as a “singularity”. He writes: “At the singularity, the rate of change of technology becomes infinite; we can’t predict what lies beyond it” (Stross, 2003, p. 13). For cultural studies theorist Henry Jenkins, this singularity—the birth of convergence culture—is defined by the clash of old and new, particularly in terms of media forms and media platforms. “Contradictions, confusions, and multiple perspectives should be anticipated at a moment of transition where one media paradigm is dying and another is being born”.

In his 2004 novel Singularity Sky, Stross uses the character of Burya Rubenstein—revolutionary leader and journalist—to further define the singularity as “a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential…the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress”. For Stross one aspect of a technological singularity is the point at which computer intelligence begins to out think the human brain. According to computing and robotics professors cited by Stross, that juncture is about 25 years away (2035) and “we cannot possibly know what life will be like” once artificial intelligence (AI) gets beyond our ability to control it. To be honest, I’m not sure if Stross is right; there’s no doubt that scientists are working on the concept of artificial intelligence, but can they produce a super-computer with thinking abilities that would be as incomprehensible to us, “as ours are to a dog or a cat”?

We will find out soon enough; but the point here is that I think that Stross is right about the rest of the singularity thesis. This disorienting dialectic (the individual against the world) appears to be predicated on technological change that is constant and seems to be speeding up, following Moore’s law of computing power doubling every 18 months. It is also clear that we are no longer analogue, we are digital and the convergence of computing and communication technologies is almost complete. In that sense perhaps we have already experienced a mini-singularity in terms of technology. Machines are getting smarter, but perhaps not quite in the semi-human AI way. Not yet, anyway.

We’ve been digital now for long enough for it to have far-reaching and non-reversible effects on our lives, the ways we work and relax and many of our cultural norms. We are already talking on a daily basis about the new social values of digital “cyberculture” in terms that media scholar Mark Deuze (2006, p. 63) describes as “an expression of an increasingly individualized society in a globalized world”. News organisations were among the first to embrace convergence, mainly for reasons of business economics, but as Australian journalism scholar Stephen Quinn (2005) observed, it also established a new dialectic—between the commercial expectations of the news capitalists and the aspirations of working journalists. Only one thing was ever certain as convergence culture grew organically from the digital revolution: as Charles Stross writes in Toast: “The future is not going to be like the past any more—not even the near future.”

This is already evident in popular culture, as media sociologists Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis noted; ideas, products, trends, styles and social mores appear to “accelerate their way from the fringe to the mainstream with increasing speed” (2003, p. 7). Media scholar Naren Chitty describes the impact of globalisation on the news media in similar terms. He says that the global and the local are now intimately intertwined in the global economy and through globalising cultural linkages: “Globalization has made the local explode in the global and the global implode on the local” (Chitty, 2000, p. 14). The impact on the global media has also been profound. The managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Mark Scott, noted this in his 2009 La Trobe University annual media studies address. Scott said that the media is in a state of “transition and turmoil” and on a “revolutionary road” that has turned the old certainties of the media industry on their head (Scott, 2009):

Daily, doomsayers beat the drums for newspapers, free‐to‐air television, regional media and investigative journalism.

Mark Scott, La Trobe speech 2009

Mark Scott also mentioned the global recession as a major factor in the decline of media advertising revenues and bottoming share prices. The global downturn, he argued, is having “profound effects” on the global business of news and media. The shift has been so sudden and the fall so steep that Scott did not appear hopeful of a significant recovery any time soon. “Executives, particularly those in the newspaper business, wonder whether the good times will ever come back”. Perhaps, at one level, it’s too late because cyberculture turns the mediasphere on its head. It seems there’s no escaping what Deuze refers to as “an emerging value system and set of expectations as particularly expressed in the activities of news and information media makers and users online” (2006, p. 63).

In Burya Rubenstein’s terms, we could argue that globalisation and, more importantly, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 has “ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage”, a “hard take-off singularity” (Stross, 2004, p. 163). When globalisation and economic crisis is combined with the mini-singularity of digital technologies, we experience the resulting state of profound change as chaos and flux. As Stross has another character say to Burya Rubenstein at a critical point in Singularity Sky: “Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.”

Well, actually: “Yes!” We have to talk of tradition, because the present and the future, are products of historical events and forces; the basic elements of convergence culture have been present in our world for most of the twentieth century—the telephone, the television and (in the last 80 years at least) the computer. So we should not be surprised by the strength of convergence culture, it is the culmination of historically situated processes that have percolated through the filter of combined and uneven development for nearly a century. It is an uneven process in that there is not one form of digital culture that sits snugly across all social formations, nor across all individuals and groups within one particular social formation.

We are all familiar with the term digital divide that signifies those with good access to the Internet and other digital technologies on one side and those with little or no access on the other. According to global statistics for Internet penetration, as of June 2008 less than a quarter of the world’s population has access to the web. The highest penetrations are North America (73 per cent) and Europe (51 per cent); the lowest Africa at 6.7 per cent (Internet World Stats, 2009). As Deuze reminds us there is no linear progression from analogue to digital, nor is digital culture necessarily an improvement on the analogue past.

American media scholar Robert McChesney also talks in terms that resemble Stross’ “singularity”; he argues that globally the communication industry, journalism and even the very democratic fabric of society has reached a “critical juncture”. This juncture—to some degree a product of the “communication and information revolution”—has a number of possible outcomes. Either, McChesney argues (2007, p. 1), it can be “a glorious new chapter in our history”, or “we may speak of it despondently, measuring what we have lost”, or “we may end up somewhere in between”. For some it’s a bright future of “life-streaming”, the practice of uploading everything you see and do to a social networking site to share with the world; for others it is a bleak future of surveillance and a total lack of privacy. There will also be economic winners and losers, for this the nature of global capitalism.

We can never know the future with any certainty and according to a former director of The Institute for the Future, Roy Amara, we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. This has become known as Amara’s Law and it reflects the dialectic of tensions and contradictions that run through our understanding of digital technologies: what Deuze (2006, p. 66) calls the “scrambled, manipulated, and converged” mediasphere. It is reasonable to assume that we have, perhaps, passed through a technological and economic singularity in the era of digital globalisation.

We are no longer living in an analogue world; though present social systems do retain elements of the analogue. Our digital world is still emergent—it is not yet fully-formed—but we can be certain that the digital dominates and that there’s no turning back the clock. As another utopian visionary wrote 150 years ago:

“All that is established melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man [sic] is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind,” (The Communist Manifesto).

My Australian colleague Julie Posetti at the University of Canberra has written a good piece in The Walkley Magazine about how journalists are, should and might make use of Twitter as a tool.

Why journalism’s all a-Twitter, Walkley Magazine Oct 2009

Julie’s piece highlights some of the professional and ethical issues that arise when Twitter enters the newsroom, but I agree with her that attempts to stop journalists from using Twitter is over-kill.

It raises a difficult issue though: when using social media, where is the line between a professional and a personal persona?

This has, to some extent been an issue in journalism for two hundred years – the separation of “objective” reporting from opinion.

But that long-standing Chinese wall breaks down in the age of social media – another digital dialectic. I wrote recently about how the New York Times code for engagement with social media attempts to keep this barrier in-place.

How can a reporter separate that side of themselves out from their personal life? It is a denial of what social media is all about, though as Julie points out, it highlights a range of contradictions:

But reporters’ use of the platform to express feelings and opinions on a range of issues has raised red flags about professional conduct and bias, although – paradoxically – it can humanise journalists to their audiences, potentially making their work more appealing.

Julie also considers the Twittering from Iran issues that came up earlier this year – the circulation of unverified information, particularly by journalists who re-tweeted material from their own accounts implying it had an editorial imprimatur:

I’m of the view that professional journalists will be judged more harshly if they RT content which later proves to be false – particularly in the context of a crisis. This goes to their professional credibility and their employer’s. Therefore, while I wouldn’t suggest journalists step back from reporting on social media contributions flowing from zones like Iran, I do think they need to critically assess information to the best of their capacity before republishing it and, if there’s no way to do so, flag this with “unconfirmed” or some other abbreviated signal (e.g. U/C) that the information has not been substantiated by the journalist. The issues at stake here partly evolve from Twitter’s speed imperative, which encourages us to “file” instantly, sometimes without enough thought for the public nature of the platform. It’s very easy to get “Twitter-happy” and post without fear of the consequences.

Finally, a useful quick reference guide:

Top 20 takeaway tips for tweeting journos

1. Think before you tweet – you can’t delete an indiscreet tweet!
2. Think carefully about what you’re RTing and acknowledge if it’s unsubstantiated.
3. Be an active twit: tweet daily if you want your followers to stick.
4. Determine your Twitter identity.
5. Be human; be honest; be open; be active.
6. Don’t lock your account if you want to use Twitter for reporting purposes – this fosters distrust.
7. Twitter is a community, not a one-way conversation or broadcast channel – actively engage.
8. Check whether your employer has a social media policy.
9. Be cautious when tweeting about your employer/workplace/colleagues.
10. Be a judicious follower – don’t be stingy, but avoid following everyone as your list grows.
11. If you quote a tweet, attribute it.
12. Expect your competitors to steal your leads if you tweet about them.
13. Don’t tweet while angry or drunk.
14. Avoid racist, sexist, bigoted and otherwise offensive tweets and never abuse a follower.
15. Scrutinise crowd-sourced stories closely.
16. Find people to follow and foster followers by pilfering the lists of other “twits”.
17. Twitter is a “time vampire” (to quote twit @anne_brand). You don’t need to keep track of all tweets – dip in and out through the day.
18. Prevent information overload by using an application such as Tweetdeck.
19. Set up your internet-enabled mobile device so you can live-tweet on the road
20. Value-add your tweets with links, Twitpic and other applications for audio and video.

Julie Posetti is an award-winning former ABC journalist and Walkley finalist who lectures in journalism at the University of Canberra. She blogs at www.j-scribe.com and can be found on Twitter as @julie_posetti

Ok, so I thought we’d nailed this long ago – BABY HERBAL SOUP IS A VIRAL INTERNET HOAX.

I’ve just come across another sick chatroom thread about the perennial ‘baby herbal soup’ hoax photographs that continue to circulate and to get more and more graphic. This is a new thread, it only went up on 20 October 2009.

That this happens is not really surprising, but the ignorant and racist comments that these posts generate is the really shocking aspect of this story.

The Furaffinity site - click to check PGA warning

click to read Seoul Times 'baby herbal soup' story PGA

It’s one thing for this viral meme to circulate in chatrooms where ignorance and prejudice seem to rule, but for a news site to run it as a straight news piece is pretty disgusting.

It’s another argument in favour of having some form of trained cadre who can verify and check and against the idea that somehow the “bottom up” Internet is going to improve on the mainstream media. It purports to be a letter to the editor and it’s dated 30 September 2008, so now it’s recirculating thanks to Fur Affinity.

I have contacted the Seoul Times editor asking her/him to remove this piece, or at least to acknowledge that it is more than likely a hoax.

I encourage you to do the same.

You can simply copy and paste this text into your email browser. The address is seoultimes@gmail.com

Dear editor, I was shocked to see that you are running the Chinese baby soup story as if it were real and verified.

This is an internet hoax and you have been fooled into running this story which feeds prejudice and racism against Chinese people.

You can see what I mean here. http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1004922/

I urge you to take this story down immediately and check for yourself that it is indeed a cruel and racist hoax.

http://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/baby-herbal-soup-update/

I would appreciate it if you reply to this letter so that I know you take your journalistic responsibility seriously

Thankyou

The employment row between Sean Plunket and Radio NZ over Metro magazine’s offer of a monthly column for the Morning Report presenter is a storm in a coffee mug moment really. [Stuff.co.nz: Plunket furore surprises editor]

After all, Paul Henry writes about cars in Metro.

The argument from RNZ seems to be that Plunket is essential to the credibility of the network’s news and current affairs brand and that to have him writing an opinion column in Metro would somehow blur the line and make people think that either:

a) Plunket’s opinions, on whatever topic his columns range over, might be read as being those of RNZ news and current affairs; or

b) Plunket’s opinions are likely to be so outrageous and damaging to his credibility as a news and current affairs presenter/interviewer that his second job offerings could  also damage the RNZ news brand.

I’m flabberghasted by this. Really I am. I think RNZ is being very precious in holding to such a hardline. In the modern world of news and current affairs there is no hard and fast line between news and opinion. In fact, Plunket is very opinionated on Morning Report anyway.

That’s why he generates so much emotion, heat and attention. Sometimes I find myself shouting at him because of the skewed line of questioning, or the ludicrous and conservative assumptions that underlie his interviewing technique. Sometimes I get annoyed at his pompous and inquisitorial style – particularly when he’s beating up on easy targets with that “holier-than-thou” tone and almost shouting loudness.

I can’t see how a column from him in Metro would be any different. I wouldn’t read it necessarily every month – though I have started buying the Auckland-centric monthly now that the deliciously wicked Felicity Ferret has been re-instated.

I also don’t see why Metro editor Bevan Rapson is so keen to have Plunket write a column. To be honest I don’t think it’s a very inspired or inspiring choice. And he doesn’t even live in Auckland!

In what way is Plunket going to add value?

Would his column be along the lines of Bill Ralston in The Listener: predictable, not-so-funny middle-of-the-road stereotype-bashing and not very enlightening. I can only hope that Plunket might use the column centimetres to reveal himself a secret National Party supporter, that would satisfy my own secret curiosity about him at least.

There’s always a dearth of good opinion-writing in the media and usually a very shallow and narrow pool of views that is constantly fished. I think Bevan could do a lot worse than quietly let the Plunket idea die down and seek some new talent from a wider gene pool.

So that would mean that Paul Holmes and his ilk should immediately be ruled out, but if Bevan’s interested, he can talk to my peeps, they’ll sort a deal and I can guarantee to be controversial – you can write that into my contract.

You can go here and here for more on this issue.

This is the 501st post on Ethical Martini, so I guess it’s some sort of milestone. I’ve been blogging now since April 2007, which roughly coincides with my arrival in Auckland to take up my current position at AUT University.

My first post was a bit crude and I’ve certainly learned a lot over the past 2.5 years.It’s also interesting to look at the traffic numbers – even though they’re somewhat unreliable.

The traffic has grown steadily, which I guess you’d expect, but EM has really taken off this year.
In 2007 I had 4261 visitors, in 2008 36777 and so far in 2009 103928 have dropped in for a peek.
My daily average has jumped from 17 per day in 2007 to over 350 in 2009.
Still not massive, but I’m happy enough with the numbers, at least for now. Though I’m not going to get rich quickly from blogging. At the average Google AdSense rate of about $7.00 per 1000 hits, so far this year I would have made about $727.36. That’s about 36 bottles of Bombay Sapphire bought duty-free. I suppose that’s roughly a year’s supply, or maybe a little longer if a bottle can last me around two weeks worth of Martinis.

Over the summer I am going to investigate establishing Ethical Martini somewhere else with a unique URL and a bit more functionality, design and sorting of topics – I don’t like that Martini Music and the general purpose of the blog – journalism and media politics etc – are all mashed together. It would be nice to have separate category pages. First I need to upgrade my account here at WordPress and then recruit some technical assistance with the redesign etc.

For now though, “Happy birthday” to me and thanks to everyone who visits and comments on this site.

I have also been keen for sometime to recruit another person(s) to share EM, so if you think you might fit the bill and can commit to regular posting on topics of your choice (suitably and tangientially related to the themes herein) I’d love to hear from you.

Dribblejaws need not apply.

I’ve had the privilege in the last couple of days of spending quality time with Isaac Mao, the well-known Chinese blogger and social media enthusiast.

Isaac is in New Zealand this week on a speaking tour of J-schools generously sponsored by the Asia-New Zealand Foundation. Isaac’s passionate commitment to free speech and democratic ideals is clear from his thoughtful and fact-packed presentations. My only regret is that more of New Zealand’s blogging community didn’t take advantage of his two speaking dates in Auckland to actually meet with Isaac.

Despite the fact that a lot of people who should have known better chose to ignore what I think is an important event of interest to Kiwi bloggers, some media have taken a great interest in Isaac’s commentary on social media and the blogosphere in China.

Isaac Mao on Asian Report with Jason Moon National Radio 20 Oct 2009

You still have a couple of chances in Wellington, Christchurch and Rotorua, it is well worthwhile. Isaac is on his way to Los Angeles whree he is a speaker at UCLA’s 40th anniversary of the Internet conference. He’s also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.2009