We have a new Cablegate, in which Vince Cable the Business Minster has revealed that he was not carrying out his quasi-Judicial role in a takeover bid by News Corporation objectively, in the presence of Daily Telegraph undercover reporters.
Two articles from the last month by the Heresiarch and Anna Raccoon form an interesting study in articles by independent publishers which gained widespread attention.
Plagiarism is an interesting game.
You can either rewrite the piece, find a bit more information, leave other bits out, and – if you’re the Daily Mail – reduce the reading age by a year or three.
Or you can acknowledge that the story came from somewhere else, and give a hat-tip for a nugget, or a small fee for an article.
Or you can try and ride both horses and end up sitting on your backside in the middle.
So, we have Exhibit A, from Dizzy Thinks:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012? Not particular shocking really, but there is an oddity.
According to an FoI release, one of the roles of this civil servant is the development of equalities impact assessment for the Queen’s celebratory bash. Why does a celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment?
Mind you, as an eagle-eyed reader put to to me. Perhaps it’s because she’s (a) a woman, (b) a pensioner, (c) dependent on state benefits, and (d) married to an immigrant?
and Exhibit B, from the Daily Mail:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. One of the roles of the civil servant is the development of an ‘equalities impact assessment’. Why does a Âcelebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment? Is it because she’s a woman, a pensioner, relies on the state for handouts — and is married to a foreigner?
The two are nearly the same, and it’s only an item in a Diary column, for heaven’s sake. A tip would cost about twenty pounds or a gift voucher, and an acknowledgement would cost nothing.
(Hat-tip: Dizzy).
[Update: re-edited]
John Rentoul of the Independent has the blog with the longest running single-blog meme in the known world. “Questions to which the answer is no” is now up to number 411 (“Will Barclays carry out its threat to leave UK?“),
I can’t compete with that, so I thought I’d start a list of Media Oops-es, i.e., cockups. This is all in the interest of media transparency, you understand. Shooting from the hip is just as big a problem for blogging journalists as it is for rednecks and Harriet Harman – though I suspect her invective was planned.
Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels has just published a mashup of Donald Duck cartoons matched to a mashed-up Glenn Beck (of Fox News) voice track, called “Right Wing Radio Duck”.
Salon Sunday is an experimental live chat on the Wardman Wire blog at 8pm on Sundays, aiming to encourage conversations across politics, media, technical and other online niches.
This Sunday our interviewee will be Philip John, who founded the Lichfield Blog. The blog is a local news blog opened after the local newspaper closed down, and focuses on “all things Cathedral city since January 2009“. The site has three main editors, a host of contributors, and currently attracts a readership in excess of 10k unique visitors each month. You can read more about the site here, or follow on Twitter at lichfieldblog or philipjohn.
This is an investigative/process piece looking at the development of a story that High Wycombe Council has spent money specifically creating a cemetary extension for Muslims, and the tensions that were stirred up in its wake. It is a piece by Alan Wilson, Area Bishop of Buckingham, a long established blogger.
I’m cross-posting it as an example of the type of narrative that bloggers can do very well, combining opinion with reporting to undermine a popular myth, and with critique of mainstream reporting along the way.
The key point I draw from the story is that a more distributed media gives a greater opportunity for “chinese whispers”, where questionable rumours to become the established orthodoxy by media sites and blogs reporting that “x has reported that y has happened” rather than going to the original source to find out if it *did* happen. Then a (dishonourable) justification is possible that “our story is accurate – we just reported what that other site was saying”.
That process also gives a deniable route for Publicists to leak claims and rumours into the public domain, and alliances of websites and blogs to promote claims which meet their political objectives. It is down to the standards of individuals, whether bloggers or reporters, how much depth of context we provide in each case.
One interesting question is how bloggers can adapt traditional journalistic values and practices in an approach which includes more elements than straight reporting. Equally, the wider media faces a similar challenge, in that opinion has become blurred into reporting in most news publications.
This is the type of blogging that goes on day-in-day-out and doesn’t usually make the national papers, or draw the attention of the politicians or campaigning groups, or get acknowledged by media commentators.
I’ve reposted the article including pictures to show Bishop Alan’s blogging style.
Following on from last week’s experimental webchat about how different people make a small or a large income from their political blogs (debate starter, actual webchat) for 10, I am running another one this evening at 8pm.
There will be a Sunday Salon tomorrow (June 6th at 8pm), looking at different aspects of linking, promotion, how people read blogs and the interaction of blogs and Twitter.
The chat will be hosted at the Wardman Wire using CoverItLive.
As a discussion starter, this post includes a podcast interview (35 minutes) I recorded earlier this week with Dan Levy, who manages the UK website of Wikio.
We covered everything from the history of Wikio to how the rankings are compiled, how the Wikio service is used, and what developments will be happening in the future.
Any help in promoting the event is welcome.
If you add a comment below I will email you with a reminder in future.
(Note: you may need to click through to the full post to listen to the podcast if you read this excerpt in a feed reader).
This looks like an excellent start. The Coalition Government has just published the COINS database, which is the detailed database of Government spending:
The release of COINS data is just the first step in the Government’s commitment to data transparency on Government spending.
You can get the database from the data.gov website here. There are explanations to help you get to grips with it here.
Tim Almond notes (via chat) that it is a 68mb zipped file which extracts to 4GB, i.e., huge. It will require significant database tools to get to grips with this, but I’m predicting that easier ways of querying may be created by someone in 48 hours.
The Wikio rankings are a measure of how much blogs are being “talked about” on other independent sites, and are produced by Wikio for a number of categories of blogs in Europe and North America, including politics, techology, culture and even Wine and Beer.
The Wikio ranking is measured by incoming editorial links (i.e., not blogrolls) from blogs registered with Wikio which appear in RSS feeds. To be clear (again), this is no measure of traffic. Links are weighted by time, prominence of the linking blog, and prominence of the link in the linking article.
There is also a toolkit, Wikio Labs, which allows you to dig down into the detail to the level of individual links.
This month I have advanced notice of the “Overall” rankings, which are below
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