Forbes and Andrew Sullivan and blogging
Posted on | January 29, 2010 | 76 Comments
There was a piece in Forbes the other day about the death of blogging which links to the post Una did on here which sparked so much debate. They used the Sunday Times piece from a few weeks previously to back up their assertions, leaving aside the fact, or ignoring, that the article was roundly dismissed by bloggers. Not because it was the Sunday Times and not because it was bloggers being precious, but because it was old, tired and the same old stuff rehashed again.
With all due respect to Sarah Carey, asking her to comment on blogging is like asking Christy Dignam to comment on being a hugely successful rock star. There may have been some vague involvement at some stage in the past but that time has long gone.
Andrew Sullivan picks up on the Forbes article and says blogging in Ireland has failed. This is based entirely on the Forbes piece based on the Sunday Times piece which, of course, was a load of bollocks. It was a rather definitive headline from Sullivan too. It has failed. Not is failing. Or is in danger of failing. Definitive – IT. HAS. FAILED.
What is interesting is this – Forbes is a hugely respected publication and you would imagine their website is very busy. Sullivan is a widely-known blogger and columnist. You would expect, having being linked by Forbes and Sullivan pointing to the Forbes article, that there would be a good flow of traffic from the article. Not so. Since it was published two days ago, I have received a grand total of 14 referrals. So who’s dead again?
Plus, I have to make sniffy noises at one section of Butterworth’s rather poorly researched piece. He says -
As one journalist told me, Ireland’s media is currently abuzz over a “confidential” legal settlement against a blogger, who allegedly had to pay almost $140,000 in damages for a libelous post, seen by few, swiftly purged from the site, and readily apologized for. This kind of judicial policing has, said the journalist, “scared the crap out of people.”
There are plenty of Irish media people blogging, plenty more of them on Twitter and I’m sure if they were abuzz with a story like this we’d have heard all about it. I have friends who work in papers and in radio and on TV and none of them have mentioned anything like this. And exactly which Irish blogger would have $140,000 to pay out? I call foul on that one unless one of those in the know in Ireland’s media can set me straight. I won’t hold my breath though.
Then there’s this:
Perhaps one of the most interesting critiques of Ireland’s blogging experiment comes from one of its veteran technology and social Web researchers, who says the blogosphere came to reflect the very vices of the establishment it ought to have been eviscerating: “It’s an incestuous little clique that doesn’t like criticism from without,” he said, asking not to be named given the sensitivity of his position. “None of the more established bloggers criticize each other. It’s a complete no-no, and as such the political dynamic is similar to the coziness of the political-financial clique that people are so pissed off with.”
Honestly, who the fuck gives a shit what anyone says about your blog? It’s words on a screen, at the end of the day, and if you take it so seriously that you a) have to slag off other blogs or b) get the hump when they slag off you then perhaps you need a new pastime.
The idea that this person, whoever he might be, asked to remain anonymous because of the sensititivty of his position is just hilarious though. What does he think would happen to him if he revealed who he was? There might be some reaction online but he’s hardly going to be confronted by an angry mob wielding pitchforks and flaming torches, is he? He doesn’t need to go into the fucking witness protection program just because he has a pop at a couple of blogs. Honestly, what a fanny, whoever it is.
Anyway, I eagerly await the next installment of the Sunday Times ‘Bloggers are shit’ series and I can’t wait for the plethora of ill-informed, spin-off articles it produces. Honest.
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76 Responses to “Forbes and Andrew Sullivan and blogging”
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January 29th, 2010 @ 10:14 am
There is a move on to marginalise free comment on the internet.
Simple as that.
January 29th, 2010 @ 10:26 am
Is this the time or place to bring up the secret meeting between the orange order, the dup and the uup on december 9th where, according to Sammy Wilson – ” the parading commission was not discussed”? hahahahaha. Sure sammy, sure….
I posted on the last una piece where I admitted that I’m an eejit who knows fuck all about blogging. I know quite a bit about finance and I can tell you that Forbes is a rag which has never had an original thought, ever. All it does is re-package other people ideas and sell it to their subscribers who are too fat to bother cancelling their subscription to the porn finance magazine shite.
Keep on keeping on twenty.
January 29th, 2010 @ 10:37 am
All it does is re-package other people ideas and sell it to their subscribers who are too fat to bother cancelling their subscription to the porn finance magazine shite.
heh
Finance is not my thing but Forbes is obviously one of those synonymous names. Would honestly have expected a lot more traffic from their site over this.
January 29th, 2010 @ 10:42 am
“Who wants the bloggers start a fight
who hates the bloggers left and right
we do,
we do”
Clink
January 29th, 2010 @ 10:51 am
14 hits combined?
Hilarious.
This mystery blogger with so-called buckets of cash to pay out for writing offensive posts needs to step up and buy some drinks at the blog awards.
January 29th, 2010 @ 10:59 am
But who is this mystery man?!
And I can see Colin Coyle and Franky Fitz sitting round chugging from goblets of ale singing that, FMC
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:01 am
Fail.
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:16 am
I know that guy. His name is M. Adeup.
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:18 am
So you’re suggesting the ‘journalist’ who gave that information was called Faye Kerr?
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:22 am
She’s the busiest reporter in the media.
And how come we’re not fucking loaded at this stage, given that our “political dynamic is similar to the coziness of the political-financial clique that people are so pissed off with”?
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:27 am
The common blogger doesn’t make the money. It’s them with the connections.
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:27 am
And those pesky web developers. Cosy indeed
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:57 am
I suppose this is just another version of Irish smallness. Yes, bloggling is cliquey. It’s because there’s not many people, playground politics, it’s just the way we are.
It reminds me of my teacher friend taking a class of kids on a trip out of Dublin, long ago,and by the time they got to Swords they were hanging out the window shouting ‘rednecks’.
We just like to create microcosms to make the country seem bigger. It gets so boring though.
January 29th, 2010 @ 11:58 am
Heh, it’s like ‘Crrrritic!’ in Waiting For Godot, except now it’s ‘Bllogggerr!’
January 29th, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
Some questions hurt poor Skinner’s brain after reading that muck from Forbes.
I know tons of people in the media. They aren’t ‘abuzz’ with anything but the Lillis trial right now, least of all any libel action. Is there another secret Dublin media where this buzz is happening? What cupboard do I crawl through to find it?
Clever Trevor has a nice track record of writing speculative, unsubstantiable guff for Forbes. You need something light to read after all those terrifying financial articles, I’d assume. That’s where Trev comes in.
Obviously Forbes thought they were getting something like the Freakonomics guys when they signed Trev up. After all, he does that statistics thing too.
Instead, they’ve had unsubstantiated guff all the way. He is devastatingly self-contradicting. Taxing alcohol won’t reduce STD rates, he says on the one hand, but taxing soft drinks would reduce obesity levels, on the other.
This latest article is a classic- the stats man has no stats at all to prop up his nonsense about the death of Irish blogging, except for some spurious Technorati numbers that simply don’t support the argument he makes.
Sure his old college pal, who hasn’t blogged in years now, might agree with him.
I don’t. And plenty of others don’t either.
And until Clever Trevor can produce some actual statistics to support his argument (which is, after all, what he’s being paid to do) or substantiate his claim about the libel settlement, I’m calling shenanigans on this whole farrago of bullshit.
January 29th, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
I don’t know about the rest of them but Andrew Sullivan changes his mind more than a child in a toy shop. I find it difficult to give him any credibility since his support for the wonderful work of George Bush and how glorious it was that he was re-elected for a second term.
There are loads of must-read blogs in Ireland: Yours Twenty, Mamam Poulet, Gavin’s Blog, Kildare Street, etc.
The media is also announcing the death of Twitter (but I think they’re right about that).
January 29th, 2010 @ 12:50 pm
when they say that blogging has failed they never seem to qualify it with a definition of success.
January 29th, 2010 @ 1:13 pm
off-topic but..
You know what annoys me most about the €3,500 spent on concert tickets by FAS?
The absolutely and completely fucking terrible taste in music. Tickets were bought for Sting, Robbie fucking Williams, Billy fucking Joel, Neil fucking Diamond, West fucking Life, bon fucking jovi. That’s a list of the worst possible torture concerts ever known to man. No mariah fucking carey or celine fucking dion though.
jesus, besides being a pack of greedy scummy cunts, the board pays to see a pack of dull cunts. With taxpayers money.
January 29th, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
Why are bloggers expected to attack other bloggers? We do like, but that’s not what blogging is. The days of back and forth blog posts between lefty and rightwing bloggers disagreeing with each other has long passed. Thanks be to. Maybe it’s because we read more blogs and can write something interesting without it being a rebuttal that that type of content has stopped?
Why do the likes of the Sunday Times and Forbes want us to attack and “critique” each other when they don’t do it to their peers apart from the odd bitchy comment in an anonymous section of the newspaper that they never sign their name to?
These media outlets cry “blogging is not a replacement for what we do” and then add “it’s failed because it doesn’t do what we do”. Yeah…
January 29th, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
Why do the likes of the Sunday Times and Forbes want us to attack and “critique” each other when they don’t do it to their peers apart from the odd bitchy comment in an anonymous section of the newspaper that they never sign their name to?
A very good point. Maybe Sue Denham could help.
January 29th, 2010 @ 3:15 pm
The professional media remind me of hookers complaining about amateur immorality.
January 29th, 2010 @ 3:20 pm
That is a great point about newspapers expecting bloggers to do what they don’t.And it’s clear some of the papers have a real agenda when it comes to blogs. Sunday Times in particular are obviously taking orders from old Rupert to make sure online stuff is dismissed as much as possible
January 29th, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
A note for “JC Skinner” – I fail to see how I can be “devastatingly contradictory” on taxes, when the entire point of my piece on soda taxes is that the latest economic research shows they won’t work. This is strongly hinted at in the subheading that appears after the title “Can A Soda Tax Really Curb Obesity?” … wait for it… “The numbers don’t say so.” And if you read the piece (I know, why let reading spoil a rant?), you can find the papers that point this out.
January 29th, 2010 @ 4:54 pm
Trevor, can you shed any further light on this $140,000 that nobody in the media, or any other Irish blogger, seems to have heard about?
January 29th, 2010 @ 6:00 pm
Snowing here Twenty – start filling saucepans !
January 29th, 2010 @ 6:10 pm
With all due respect to Sarah Carey
Wikianswers is unclear as to what the smallest amount of respect actually is. But a guy called Planck comes into it.
January 29th, 2010 @ 6:20 pm
“Honestly, who the fuck gives a shit what anyone says about your blog? It’s words on a screen, at the end of the day, and if you take it so seriously that you a) have to slag off other blogs or b) get the hump when they slag off you then perhaps you need a new pastime.”
Here, here. Some take themselves so seriously don’t you think. Not saying any names (ahem Bock the Robber)
January 29th, 2010 @ 6:46 pm
So where’s your numbers on the death of Irish blogging then, Trev?
Let’s start with the one number you did provide – that spoof libel settlement.
Admit it – it doesn’t exist, does it, Trev? Just like the death of Irish blogging doesn’t exist. Or your credibility.
January 29th, 2010 @ 6:48 pm
Surely the blog readership decide if blogging is dead/has failed?
As far as I know a blogger’s quest is to write and be read. And often to engage in follow-up exchanges with readers.
There’s still an appreciative audience for blogs and there are still plenty of people blogging. I always read Twenty, Stranded on Gaia, Esker Riada, Good After-Morning, and FMC. Many people read loads more. Doesn’t sound like dead or failed to me.
January 29th, 2010 @ 7:56 pm
Sarah Carey makes my heart go all a flutter.
*scratch
January 29th, 2010 @ 8:06 pm
Great commentary Twenty!
While i’m pleased that Andrew has distanced himself from the looney rightwing, he’s mistaken on the issue of irish blogging and the global reach of Irish politics (e.g. its uptake by bloggers like towleroad.com and the huffington post). He might have simply rehashed the other article, but it demonstrates an impoverished reading of the irish context. indeed the world of blogging (and related internet politics) is opening up new spaces for politics – quite the opposite to the demise he insists has happened.
January 29th, 2010 @ 10:35 pm
I told you twitter was dead.. I TOLD YOU!
January 30th, 2010 @ 10:50 am
“So where’s your numbers on the death of Irish blogging then, Trev?
Let’s start with the one number you did provide – that spoof libel settlement.
Admit it – it doesn’t exist, does it, Trev? Just like the death of Irish blogging doesn’t exist. Or your credibility.”
Excellent questions, I too would be interested in the answers, assuming there ARE answers to them.
January 30th, 2010 @ 12:38 pm
Trevor?
January 30th, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
Trevor’s piece has a total of three reader comments, one of which is from himself.
Does he not publish all the comments?
January 30th, 2010 @ 2:25 pm
Maybe they just don’t get any comments. The number of comments is usually a reasonble reflection of how many people are reading.
January 30th, 2010 @ 2:36 pm
I can understand a journalist like Trevor taking issue with a demand to reveal exactly how he constructed an article. That’s a potentially silly road to go down — there are a lot of cranks out there.
However, I have to take issue with this line:
“…Ireland’s media is currently abuzz over a “confidential” legal settlement…”
This very strongly implies that there is, indeed, such a settlement. But I’m in the media. And I’ve heard nothing about this. I also checked around with several senior journalists and editors. They’d heard nothing either. Finally, I checked with a few long-established, Irish bloggers. You guessed it — nothing.
Perhaps there was such a libel settlement. But it is certainly incorrect to say that Ireland’s media is “abuzz” with news/talk of it.
Now, perhaps one of the journalists/sources that Trevor spoke to told him this, as he suggests. If so, he should have attributed the ‘fact’ that the Irish media is “abuzz” to this journalist alone. So that at least we’d know that the error was his source’s (even if he still bore some responsibility for having quoted it).
He didn’t though. He said: “As one journalist told me, Ireland’s media is currently abuzz…”
See the difference? Trevor is suggesting that the journalist’s remark only confirmed something that he was aware of already, or knew as a fact. That “Ireland’s media is currently abuzz”.
But there is no buzz.
So he’s responsible there for some sort of error, be it mixed-up reporting (which can happen, by the way) or, perhaps, exaggeration.
January 30th, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
maggot settled for 140k with me for calling me “one of them” and “a shinner”.
:)
January 30th, 2010 @ 3:18 pm
Trevor seems almost as big a cunt as itchy.
January 30th, 2010 @ 3:21 pm
But who cares what a slaphead posing with shades hooked in his shirt says ?
Sluggerotoole ? self-important twats.
January 30th, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
And here was me thinking that my peace offering would be reciprocated. Damn; it’s now bloody obvious that I’m a thick paddy.
January 30th, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
Spurssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
January 30th, 2010 @ 4:48 pm
“Maybe they just don’t get any comments. The number of comments is usually a reasonble reflection of how many people are reading.”
That’s kinda what I was getting at.
January 30th, 2010 @ 5:55 pm
Three prominent legal firms that often deal with libel cases have told me that they are utterly unaware of any such settlement.
Needless to say, there was never any court date. But it would be unlikely for any such settlement to have taken place without any of these firms being involved, never mind without any of them having heard of it.
And I still haven’t heard anyone in the media confirm this nonsense.
@Adrian: would you consider unsubstantiated hearsay from a single unnamed source in a country where you aren’t based to be sufficient information on which to base an entire article?
Because if we’re dealing with how Trev constructed his article, it pretty much hangs on that specious anecdote.
January 30th, 2010 @ 6:04 pm
JC,
No, not to hang an entire article. In fairness, I’m not sure that the entire article hung on that element of it.
However, in my view, that part it is (to us) far and away the most interesting/significant/newsworthy element of the article. If it’s true.
Perhaps it is true. Perhaps it’s not. The main thing I took issue with, as I said, was that he wrote that the Irish media was “abuzz” with talk about this alleged “settlement”.
It’s not.
January 30th, 2010 @ 6:29 pm
Politics.ie on this LOL
http://tiny.cc/UmGNi
January 30th, 2010 @ 8:32 pm
The last part of the article seems to say that Irish Economy – a blog – is doing the job that people thought blogs would do, and this proves that blogging is dead.
I wish I was clever enough to understand that.
January 30th, 2010 @ 9:27 pm
Tweeting by B
http://tiny.cc/uedH8
January 30th, 2010 @ 9:47 pm
So in other words a piece in a magazine about how blogging is dead gets few to no comments at the magazine’s site, but a blog post about the piece on a blog gets, what, 48 comments.
How can this be??
January 30th, 2010 @ 11:16 pm
So in other words a piece in a magazine about how blogging is dead gets few to no comments at the magazine’s site, but a blog post about the piece on a blog gets, what, 48 comments.
How can this be
heh, goes to what Div was saying above.
Tinman – yeah, it’s a mystery, eh?
Spurssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BIIIIIIIIRMIIIIIIIIIIIIIINGHAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMM!!!
January 31st, 2010 @ 12:47 am
Slaphead has serious dose of sour grapes
BIIIIIIIIRMIIIIIIIIIIIIIINGHAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMM!!!
CuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnnnnttttttttttttttttTTTTTTTTT!!!
January 31st, 2010 @ 11:05 am
Okay, much more detail on this story now, in today’s Sunday Times (front page).
January 31st, 2010 @ 12:06 pm
Thankfully vulgar abuse is not libel.
Interesting read
http://tinyurl.com/yz5ymu3
January 31st, 2010 @ 12:09 pm
Sure sign of panic among the dead-tree press. If blogging in Ireland was such an obvious failure why does it appear to be sowing such panic among traditional channel commentators?
They doth protest too much.
January 31st, 2010 @ 12:45 pm
Interesting timing though – the Forbes article was 4 days before the story broke – and of course it has disseminated the smoke from the original libel round the world.
January 31st, 2010 @ 1:09 pm
Here’s what we’ve ALL been abuzz about, without even realising: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7009820.ece
January 31st, 2010 @ 1:40 pm
“Tweeting by B
http://tiny.cc/uedH8“
http://tinyurl.com/yef9ebh
January 31st, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
The most telling quote from the Sunday Times article is:
Ó Donnchú was cleared of wrongdoing by an internal inquiry in the Department of Arts in 2007. It concluded that the department’s interests were not compromised by his relationship with Barnes, and that the official had “dealt appropriately” with his responsibilities under ethics legislation.
Naturally, it was an internal inquiry and the Department saw no evidence of wrongdoing. How surprising.
Ardmayle was never going to be able to defend himself against that. It would have meant a government department demonstrating accountability. Never happens.
Where does that leave blogging though? If I leave a scurrilous, untrue statement about someone here (Mary Harney is a closet anorexic lesbian ex-nun with a smack habit for example), where does that leave Twenty?
January 31st, 2010 @ 2:44 pm
Sullivan may have had an inside track about this case, but it is not the same as claiming Irish blogging has failed.
I’m appalled about the libel case outcome at so many levels.
January 31st, 2010 @ 2:54 pm
Not sure about the ROI, but in the UK (Sheffield Wednesday v Hargreaves [2007] EWHC 2375:)
I do not think that it would be right to make an order for the disclosure of the identities of users who have posted messages which are barely defamatory or little more than abusive or likely to be understood as jokes. That, it seems to me, would be disproportionate and unjustifiably intrusive.
January 31st, 2010 @ 3:31 pm
Fascinating and appalling development.
Firstly, hat tip to Clever Trevor. He was on the money on the libel, even if it was news to everyone else (including the ST, who were likely only alerted to it here, since we know what close readers of this blog they are).
Secondly, Ardmayle must have huge pockets to settle that figure. But it’s still a ridiculous figure, and underscores the ongoing need to tear up our libel laws and start again.
Finally, bloggers take note. Irish blogging is nowhere near dead, as alleged by Trev, but it could be close to being murdered by the Irish libel system if this sets precedent.
January 31st, 2010 @ 3:33 pm
JC says:
“Finally, bloggers take note. Irish blogging is nowhere near dead, as alleged by Trev, but it could be close to being murdered by the Irish libel system if this sets precedent.”
Sounds EXACTLY like what the ‘dead tree press’ are constantly saying about libel laws :)
January 31st, 2010 @ 3:34 pm
ps Trevor was still wrong about the Irish media being “abuzz” about it. It genuinely wasn’t.
January 31st, 2010 @ 3:57 pm
[...] here in the print media have decided that book-reading is over, and thus that newspapers have triumphed over yet another forum for [...]
January 31st, 2010 @ 4:20 pm
The Phoenix Magazine has written about the manuscript, the money involved, and the people involved, for the last 4 or 5 years without getting sued.
It’s good to know that the people who work in the departemnt responsible for holding onto and acquiring literature of historical and national importance don’t let taxpayers money get in the way of things.
January 31st, 2010 @ 4:24 pm
Itchy,
You’re right, it has. It feels that the outcome did not reflect its understanding of the central issues involved (Being careful here, myself!)
However, look at the language it uses and the way it writes its pieces. It’s ultra-cautious. (And rightfully so, knowing the litigiousness of parties involved.)
January 31st, 2010 @ 4:33 pm
I read an article in The Irish Indepdent last week that had a full page story about a new furniture shop that Laura Barnes owns, in Ranelagh I think. The furniture looks lovely. I don’t know if I could afford it but I’ll ramble in to see if there’s any value.
*trembling fingers worrying about Schillings but content that there’s nothing libellous above
January 31st, 2010 @ 4:37 pm
My advice is to bring a solicitor. That way, you CAN’T say anything untoward. Consult him/her before saying ANYTHING.
LB: “Hello, there.”
[Your solicitor]: “My client wishes to respond to your greeting in the following manner: hello.”
January 31st, 2010 @ 4:43 pm
Ah fuck it Adrian, I’ll go to Ikea, I like scandanavians – not libellous Tiger!
January 31st, 2010 @ 7:30 pm
Solicitors are cunts. Come the revolution the entire legal system will be swept away in a tide of blood and replaced by tribunals of decent citizens. For difficult cases the ducking stool.
January 31st, 2010 @ 8:00 pm
Ducking stool, maggot?
Is that some sort of rhyming slang?
January 31st, 2010 @ 8:03 pm
Those were the days!
http://tinyurl.com/yh4va8a
February 1st, 2010 @ 12:50 am
Bertie watching 3d
February 1st, 2010 @ 2:01 am
And I’ve realised what was bothering me – Carmel is the spit of Michael Jackson!
February 5th, 2010 @ 8:42 am
[...] Twentymajor wrote “There are plenty of Irish media people blogging, plenty more of them on Twitter and I’m sure if they were abuzz with a story like this we’d have heard all about it.” [...]
February 8th, 2010 @ 9:56 pm
Bizarre and unfortunate that he settled. Clearly he was bullied into it with vague threats of costs.
It’s a pity it didn’t go to court. I (along with a few others I know) would like to have seen Barnes and O Donnuchu answer a few questions.