From the archives (2) Blogging and human rights

blogging-human-rights
Iranian protest photo Christopher Rose

In case you were curious, the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Iranians who interact with the internet are by definition risk-takers.
Photo Christopher Rose
As recently as late 2016, five Iranians were sentenced to prison terms for writing and posting images on fashion blogs. The content was decreed to ‘encourage prostitution’.
The Independent quoted lawyer Mahmoud Taravat via state news agency Ilna that the eight women and four men he represented received jail time of between five months to six years. He was planning to appeal the sentences handed down by a Shiraz court on charges including ‘encouraging prostitution’ and ‘promoting corruption’.

The immediacy of blogging appeals to those who live under oppressive regimes. They use the online diary to inform the world of the injustices in their country as and when they happen. I cited Iran (Persia) as just one example of a country where expressing strong opinions contrary to the agenda of the ruling government is extremely risky business.
The founder of Iran’s blogging movement, Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger, spent six years in prison (the original sentence was 19 and a half years), before being pardoned by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Derakhshan also helped promote podcasting in Iran and appears to have been the catalyst that spawned some 64,000 Persian language blogs (2004 survey). Clearly there is/was a level of dissent among people who think the right to free speech is worth the risk of incarceration or worse.

Blogging can be a lot of things in Australia, but risky it rarely is, so long as you are mindful of the laws regarding defamation and contempt of court. Not so for bloggers or citizen journalists of oppressed countries who try to get the facts out.
It is no coincidence that most of the countries guilty of supressing free speech are among the 22 countries named by Amnesty International as having committed war crimes. They include Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan and, closer to home, Myanmar, where persecution and discrimination persists against the Rohingya. Amnesty’s national director Claire Mallinson told ABC’s The World Today that not only are people being persecuted where they live, 36 countries (including Australia) sent people back into danger after attempts to find refuge.
Amnesty’s 450-page Human Rights report for 2015-2016 does not spare Australia from criticism, particularly our treatment of children in custody, with Aboriginal children 24 times more likely to be separated from their families and communities. We are also complacent when it comes to tackling world leaders and politicians accused of creating division and fear.

Still, at least if you live in Australia you can openly criticise something the government is doing (or not doing), apropos this week’s Q&A and the Centrelink debt debate.
According to literary types who seem to have warmed to my turn of phrase, FOMM is not a blog as such, but an example of ‘creative nonfiction’ which I am told is not only a genre, but also something taught at universities.
I never knew that.
Bloggers in comfortable democracies like ours use blogs to write about cats, dogs, goldfish, cake recipes, fashion, yoga, raising babies, travel adventures and produce how-to manuals about anything you care to name.
The definition of a blog is ‘a regularly updated public website or web page, typically run by an individual or small group, written in an informal or conversational style.’
Scottish comedian and slam poem Elvis McGonagall, who you met last week, satirises the blog format with this entry.
Monday:
Woke up. Had a thought. Dismissed it. Had another. Dismissed that. Stared at the cows. The cows stared back. Scratched arse. Shouted at telly. Threw heavy object at telly. Had a wee drink. Had another. Went to bed.
Tuesday to Sunday – repeat as above

The definitive blog is an online daily diary, kept by people while travelling, carrying out some stated mission like preparing for an art exhibition, producing an independent album, dieting or training for a triathlon. Most of these literary exercises are abandoned at journey’s end, or on completion of the mission. A fine example of this is folksinger John Thompson’s marathon effort to post an Australian folk song each day for a year. He did this from Australia Day 2011 to January 26, 2012.
Some of the tunes have ended up on albums by Cloudstreet, Thompson’s musical collaboration with Nicole Murray and Emma Nixon.
The social worth of a blog, though, is when an oppressed human being writes a real time account of what atrocity or infringement of human rights is happening in their third-world village, right now.
There are millions of blogs circulating on the worldwide web, many of which are concerned with marketing, selling, promoting and luring readers into subscribing to the bloggers’ products and/or clicking on sponsors’ links. It is nigh-on impossible to find a list of blogs independently assessed on quality, although some have tried.
The Australian Writers Centre held a competition in 2014 to find Australia’s best blogs, dividing entries into genres like Personal & Parenting, Lifestyle/Hobby, Food, Travel, Business, Commentary and Words/Writing. The competition attracted hundreds of entries which were whittled down to 31 finalists.

The AWC told FOMM it has since switched its focus to fiction competitions but has not dismissed the popularity of blogging. Even so, continuity is an ever-present issue.
The 2014 winner, Christina Sung, combined travel and cooking, two topics which spawn thousands of blogs worldwide, into The Hungry Australian. But as happens with blogs, the author has somewhat moved on since then. As Christina last posted in September 2016: ‘Hello, dear readers! Apologies for my lengthy absence but I’ve been working on a few writing projects lately’.
Likewise, the author of The Kooriwoman, the Commentary winner for a blog about life as an urban Aboriginal in Australia, has not posted since January 2016.
It is not uncommon for finely-written blogs like those mentioned to have a hiatus or disappear without notice, for a myriad of reasons linked to other demands and distractions in the authors’ lives.
The few lists of Australian blogs you can find tend to rank them on popularity (numbers of followers or clickers). The top 10 blogs in this list are all about food or travel.
http://www.blogmetrics.org/australia
Hands-down winner Not Quite Nigella is a daily blog curated by Lorraine Elliott who according to blogmetrics has 28,523 monthly visitors. It’s not hard to see why – the blog is constantly updated with recipes, restaurant reviews, travel adventures and the like, featuring mouth-watering photos and a chatty prose style.
So there are those like Lorraine who make a living from blogging and those who start with a skyrocket burst of enthusiasm and fall to ground like the burnt-out stick.
Whatever your absorbing passion in life happens to be – cross-dressing, wood-carving, wine-making, writing haikus, collecting Toby jugs, quilt-making, proofreading or growing (medicinal) marijuana, you can bet someone out there has created a blog.
Just yesterday for no reason other than a bit of light relief after months of heatwave conditions, I searched for ‘grumpy spouse blog’ and got 22 hits. Have a look at this one – it’s choice.

How many bloggers to change a lightbulb?

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Image by Tanja-Denise Schantz www.pixabay.com

The question should be – is FOMM a blog, a topical weekly essay, Citizen journalism or the random musings of a flawed human being who craves attention?

When posting it on the WordPress website, I am reminded that FOMM is not a conventional blog. It’s those endless reminders from the SEO plug-in. For those who have no idea what that means, Search Engine Optimisation is the key to more hits and making it further up the tree of Google rankings. SEO is a nag machine – you already used this keyword – don’t do that. Almost every week it gives my screed a low score for readability. You reckon?

If you are engaged to write short, entertaining blog posts for a company, SEO is essential. If you are being asked to post 10 to 20 times a week you need SEO to penetrate the on-line miasma of ‘Content’.

The way I was brought up, content meant happy with your lot in life. What it means in blog marketing terms is to write entertainingly and splatter keywords throughout your Content. The more times you say ‘widget’ when writing about a widget the higher you will be ranked by Google’s search engines. It’s an insane marketplace.

There are 600 million blogs and 1.7 billion websites out there. They write about anything from Taiwan’s right to independence from China to why the bristles always fall out of shaving brushes. This is not counting the untold numbers of communiques from people who bypass the whole process and just send an email to a list of readers.

Joy, an environmental activist, starting emailing friends about five years ago when the Adani coal project and climate change deniers were unfortunate bedfellows. Joy tells me her missives are sometimes known by readers as ‘Joy’s blog’.

Joe Dolce, who wrote the novelty song ‘Shaddup Your Face’, wrote a weekly letter for years. I know this because a friend shared one of his long, eccentric emails with me and I subscribed.

Famous songwriter Eric Bogle writes a kind of a blog which he simply puts out there on his Facebook page. Sometimes they are, as he’ll say, grumpy old man rants. Other times, Bogle writes with great sensitivity and hits a nerve the way his best songs do.

This is the goal of bloggers – to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last word, Alluring headlines have their role to play and I must confess this is not my strong point as a writer. My strength (if indeed I have one) is that I post every Friday, no matter what else is going on in our lives (even on holidays, says ED, somewhat testily).

Daffodil-loving Ange is what I’d call a sporadic blog writer – the best of hers are when she and hubby hit the road and share the trials and travails and lovely images of their travel. I think they are still missing luggage from a trip to the Red Heart (but the daffies are out). My favourite Ange quote comes from a late 2021 Australian road trip.

“I’m so excited about travelling again I even ironed my Lorna Jane cargo pants.”

Australia’s oldest regular blogger Everald Compton, 90+, posts most weeks. Everald’s election-eve analysis of the state of politics and forecasts of things to come was almost 100% on the money and worth re-reading.

Everald, whose CV includes professional fundraiser, inland rail promoter and National Seniors chief executive, has a few favourite causes. In his latest blog he (again) calls for the inclusion of our indigenous people in Australia’s constitution.

Let’s be clear when distinguishing blogs and bloggers from writers who share their opinions about politics, sport, culture, indigenous affairs, climate change, the environment et al.

A blogger in the commercial sense of the word writes interesting (short) articles for companies that are trying to grow their on-line businesses. Let’s say you have a micro-business that makes useful but not indispensable tools. You’ve invented the perfect toenail cutter and employ a blogger to write enticing copy.

“The Toejam fits snugly into the palm, its laser-guided cutting blades fitting beneath the curviest toenail. Its in-built sensors sound an alarm if you are about to engage with flesh. The Toejam comes with a tiny vacuum attachment so you don’t leave toenail parings all over the bedroom floor. The wife really likes it!

The deputy director of On-line Engagement (OE) fires back a terse email to the contract blogger.

“You only mention Toejam twice – for text of this length you should use the brand keyword at least six times. Also, the brief asked for 150 words so you are 95 words short. Try again and please, what does your wife have to do with anything?”

You can find on-line copy of this ilk designed to sell everything from green tea to rocket launchers. Yeh nah, FOMM is not a blog of that ilk.

Oberlo’s research reveals that micro blogging platform Tumbler is the king of Content, home to 488 million blogs. Its closest competitor, WordPress, hosts 78 million new posts on its platform every month. Four or sometimes five of these are mine.

Nine out of ten Content generators use blogs to sell stuff. Businesses with a blog receive 55% more visitors to their website than those that don’t. They also produce 67% more leads every month.

I decided back in 2014 if I was going to write a newspaper-style opinion column I’d need to write at least 800 words and settled on 1200. The on-line wisdom at the time was that short and fluffy works.

One of my early unsubscribers informed me: “Sorry, Bob. It’s TMTR.” I had to Google that and found it was slang for Too Much To Read.

For those who wish to write blogs that aren’t merely advertising avenues, experts like Databox now recommend writing blog posts of between 1,500 and 2000 words, as the average blog post length has increased over the past seven years from 800 to 1,200 words.

It’s hard to find an objective list of top blogs and when you do, many are mainstream media blogs, ranked by audience size rather than by content.

There are a few independent blogs in this Top 50 list from Feedly that cross over into my own list of recommended blogs (Pearls & Irritations, The Conversation, John Quiggan, Michael West).

The best blogs start as a simple on-line diary, usually generated when the writer is visiting new places. There are many great travel blogs including Nomadic Matt, The Blonde Abroad, Salt in our Hair, Little Aussie Travellers and Ange’s Around the World in 99 Days.

Last time I wrote about blogs and bloggers I mentioned the famous Swedish centenarian Dagny Carlsson, who recently died at the age of 109. She started blogging age 100 under the name Bojan after becoming “bored with retirement. Her posts were short, to the point and often cheeky. At 106 she advised people to “stop whining and get a grip. Dagny’s last blog post was on January 28 when she wrote: “like a cat, I have at least nine lives, but I do not know what I should use so much of life for.”

Frivolity aside, if you live in a country with a repressive regime, writing a blog is one (dangerous) way of keeping the world informed. I discovered (in 2017) the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing (blogging) like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Although they are taking risks, rebel bloggers living in autocratic countries know their story will be picked up by libertarian journalists in democratic countries.

It’s the Internet, eh.

FOMM Back Pages

 

Facebook’s news ban – what was that all about?

Facebook-news-ban
Graph supplied by Chartbeats/NiemanLab

Nothing better demonstrates the irrelevancy of  Facebook’s news ban than this tweet from elder statesman Everald Compton.

“My friends in Parliament tell me that meeting between #CraigKelly and #Barnaby was to create new #conservative party with Barnaby as leader.

They will be joined by Christensen and Canavan and sit on the cross benches. #Morrison will lead minority government. Happy Days.”

Compton, who many would know through his long-running blog, Everald at Large, posted the 45-word tweet at 5.30 on Tuesday. An enterprising friend took a screenshot and emailed it to me, which is one of the myriad ways enterprising people circumnavigated Facebook’s too-much too-soon decision to ban the sharing of ‘news’.

Twitter consumers would simply ‘retweet’ so their 654 followers will see Everald’s tweet too. Just so you know, the usual Facebook sharing route would be for a friend to ‘retweet’ on Twitter and, subject to your own Facebook settings, share it as a post. Said friends would then re-share (on Facebook or elsewhere). But as you know, that was briefly not possible, until this morning.

The alternative, copying a news link from a publisher and emailing it to a few friends, is a poor substitute for assuming that your 654 friends will read long articles like Ross Garnaut’s theory of ‘voluntary unemployment’. (by which he means a deliberate government policy of maintaining an unemployment rate, not another term for ‘dole bludgers’. Ed)

While Facebook today re-instated news sharing on its platform, as it has promised, during its week-long hiatus, Facebook regressed to a state where every second post was either an ad (sponsored), an attempt by zealots to bypass the news sharing ban (cut and paste and share) , or paid ads from conventional news outlets. The latter usually said something like ‘If you are looking for (our) news here, you won’t find it – go to our website or download our app.”

I briefly wondered if conventional media paid Facebook for these ads or whether it was some sort of good faith gesture. Unlikely, given the speed with which Facebook unleashed its mysterious algorithms; which not only shut off news sharing, but inadvertently shut off access to government websites, hospitals, emergency services, charities and even humble not-for-profit blogs.

Everald Compton’s tweet also demonstrates the gulf between the way people used to consume and disseminate information and what they do now.

In the not so long ago world of journalism, a person privy to such intel would have quietly picked up the phone and dialled the number of their pet journo (“mate, you didn’t hear it from me”).

The immediacy (and brevity) of Twitter allows someone with Compton’s media skills to distribute this hot rumour to the world in general in a heartbeart.

Is it accurate and does it really matter?

Craig Kelly’s sudden resignation from the Liberal Party to sit on the cross-bench raises all manner of scenarios. He will be wooed by the National Party and others on the fringes of politics and the suggestion he may buddy up with Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and George Christensen is wholly on the cards.

So far the ‘traditional media’ is having nowt to say about the possibilities of a new (some have said ‘Trumpian’), political party. Compton’s view on the matter would seem to be that whatever happens, Prime Minister Morrison will lead a minority government. He will have no option but to do deals to get legislation across the line.

Facebook’s decision on February 18 to ban news sharing on its platform was triggered by mooted legislation that would force Facebook to pay media companies for sharing their news content. While the legislation has been amended in the Senate, the draft legislation now has to go back to Parliament. But deals have clearly been done.

The business risk to Facebook was a potential loss of custom from people who decide to source their news elsewhere. The clearer risk to publishers is the quantum drop off in traffic to their news sites.

According to Harvard University’s NiemanLab (and Chartbeat), the ban sent the hourly rate of Facebook traffic to news sites from within Australia tumbling. Chartbeat’s analysis concluded that when Facebook traffic dropped off, overall Australian traffic did not shift to other platforms.

This drop has been seen most dramatically in traffic to Australian sites from readers outside of Australia: Because that readership was so driven by Facebook, overall this outside-Australia traffic has fallen day-over-day by over 20% (or more)”

NiemanLab had speculated that if Facebook’s news ban were to continue, dedicated news consumers might adapt in ways that are positive for news publishers. For example, they might visit a publisher’s website more often, or sign up for a daily newsletter.

NiemanLab’s Joshua Benton concluded: “Casual reader of news on Facebook and that’s most users, given that news stories make up only about 4% of the typical News Feed, might just skip news entirely.”

Australian economist and blogger John Quiggin says the real problem is advertising. Facebook and Google are able to offer advertisers much better targeting of ads than either news organisations or traditional broadcasters.

Much of the content used to make this targeting work is links to content prepared by traditional news organisations,” Quiggin wrote in The Conversation, a not-for-profit news portal.

The entire debate about who benefits most — the organisations that do the linking or the organisations that are linked to — misses the point.

We have always put up with advertising in order to get the information produced by news organisations.

Now the advertising revenue is flowing to Google and Facebook, and we have no model for funding news media in the future.”  Quiggin, who is Professor of the School of Economics at the University of Queensland, suggests the solution may be direct public funding, “perhaps financed by a tax on advertising.

Quiggin notes that his own blog, www.johnquiggin.com, had been affected by the ban, even though it carries no advertising and does not seek payment from Facebook. WordPress automatically posts this weekly missive to Bobwords, my blog page on Facebook. But when I tried to share it to my personal page last Friday, I got the same message as when trying to share Prof. Quiggin’s post yesterday afternoon:

In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook restricts the posting of news links and all posts from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted. 

Now hang on a minute, didn’t Facebook say (on Tuesday) it would re-instate news links? Like the Queen Mary, it took a long time to turn around.

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