Mood:
coolTopic: independent media
It's not the end of the month yet to properly report our hit rate. Still we noticed this provocative item in The Australian today: Ghosts of blogging haunt net cemetery with Trioli ABC Sydney radio confirming it's a premature valedictory.
We can say our www.sydneyalternativemedia.com/blog is growing from 2,800 to 4,400 to 6,600 hits per month in the last 3 months roughly 8 days left to go in this 3rd one (we started January 3rd). Our biggest story so far was on the role of climate change in this NSW election (900 hits or so). That's a positive trend at least.
And there is another intangible measure of our fifth estate discipline on the 4th (Big Media) and 3rd (politicians) estate: We notice a sense of dejavu reading/hearing our language back at us. It could be parallel thinking but it's happening so often that it's either a lift, a crib, a borrow (which is okay with our open copyright), or 3 degrees of separation in the endless creative recycling which is the human condition:
- This morning John Hewson refers to "squandered" opportunity by the Libs in this election (which was our nice word for Fred Nile's treatment of God's creation with his redneck voting patterns);
- In the Daily Telegraph editorial today we noticed the Iemma Govt refered to as "accident prone" which was also our mood emoticon choice in the blog template for our election report yesterday Sunday 25th March;
- In the Sydney Morning Herald today Davd Marr refers to the old axiom 'your enemies enemy is your short term ally' which was also our recent blogger terminology (to find an ethical resolution of Norman Thompson's criticism of Clover Moore's suspect developer donations back in the 2004 election to stave off the ALP gerrymander of City Hall).
- Again in the Herald today an image of candidate Prue Goward praying (or preying) in a Goulburn church similar to our metaphorical image (see yesterday - election report) of voters in a local church hall booth like sheep fulfilling some tired religous obligation. A lesson in faith over reality.
Or maybe it's just our ego noticing these echoes. But it happens alot.
No surprise specialised blogs are healthy. Trioli's crew wouldn't take my call on air this morning but they knew my surname (!). And anyway the Oz article above is spliced amongst the "Paul Kelly Blog" and the "Janet Albrechtsen blog" in the newspaper's own website rebuffing the sense of their own article really. You can be sure the disciplined-by-blog Big Media are not really safe critics of blogging and resent the fact being told as professional journalists they never were that high on the intellectual or wisdom hierarchy in the first place. Think about it - they were the guys (gender neutral) getting the (f)arts degrees.
Which is why we enjoyed this piece so much as even more healthy discipline on the grotesquely overpaid and indeed captured 4th estate:
"Talk is cheap and newspeak beckons by Julianne Schultz is the editor of Griffith REVIEW (ABC Books) and the author of Reviving the Fourth Estate: Democracy, Accountability and the Media (Cambridge University Press)."
But what can be said about sustainable blogging is that one needs to be a creatively inspired person, and as such dependent on the medium, not so much for shallow self aggrandisement but as a safety valve and harmoniser of one's own maelstrom of insights as if to unload a burden, of too much knowledge. Indeed blogging, like painting, or singing, or book writing is pretty much for its own sake. It's not nearly enough to have a big ego (though it helps to get started) because, well, an ego per se just runs out of material which was the real message in the Oz: Celebrity might spread over the world like a thin sprinkle of radioactive dust from a massive burst of energy, touching everyone and everything, but it's not very useful, and in the worst cases a fatal germ.
And it certainly helps with blogger motivation if your previous truth telling has closed off all the orthodox pathways (just like Muhammed Ali was shut out) in a systemicly corrupt and grasping polity. In that case blogging is virtually an inevitability to sidestep the fascist gatekeepers and their powermongering.
