Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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What, nothing about Key endorsing John Banks for Supermayor?
National politicians tend to try and distance themselves from Mayors, esp large metropolitan 'super-mayors' who tend to get a little nutty and difficult to control (obviously this would never happen with Banks).
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Kudos to Goff for refusing to be part of it.
By convention the opposition leader generally only debates the PM, senior cabinet ministers and other party leaders. You have to wonder what kind of half-wit producer ever thought he'd go on live TV to debate a blogger no matter what their reputation.
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I just hope that Mr Slater doesn't become one of TVNZ's new "go to" people on politics.
Slater wasn't terrible but he wasn't any good either and more importantly he didn't seem to know anything. His reputation on the blogosphere aside, he's not very good TV talent - it was a bad call on their producers part and I doubt he'll be back.
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The rumours I'm hearing from a reliable source are (a) nothing to do with Watercare or any such matters, (b) very serious and (c) very very ugly. Even if they prove untrue Worth should have told the PM about them.
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I really liked 'Paradise Hotel', which was an early reality TV show that quickly took the entire premise of the form to it's logical conclusion: a dozen hot, shallow, stupid out of work actors were shipped off to a luxury hotel in the Bahamas. They were given unlimited amounts of alcohol and filmed 24 hours a day. What were the rules? There weren't any! What were the prizes? No prizes! Just the threat of being kicked out of Paradise Hotel, which fans of the show quickly renamed 'Drunk Asshole Hotel'. Each episode consisted of 45 minutes of smoking hot stupid people groping each and making out, interspersed with hysterical screaming matches. It was like a soft-core porn movie in which the pool cleaner and the cheerleader have a bitter, ugly breakup at the conclusion of each sex scene. God I miss it.
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Makes mental note to include pictures of Ayn Rand in every one of his posts hereinafter
Be prepared for your comments section to get weird.
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There is a difference between using a site and ending up on it
I think there's a lot to be said for that Giovannni - some time last year I posted a picture of Ayn Rand on my blog, somehow it rose to the top of the google image results for Ayn Rand and I had 100+ extra visitors per day looking for pictures of Ayn Rand. True story.
I guess it's in the interests of people selling ads online to use metrics like 'unique browsers/month', but if I were paying for ads on these sites I'd want statistics like 'number of visitors/day who stayed longer than 10 seconds'.
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Alaister,
Like I said, I respect what you're doing and applaud the idea of a locally owned online advertising outfit. And I assume you're working/debating in good faith. But from my own experience I'm aware that the number of people reading blogs in this country is microscopically small.
I work in a university, have friends in arts, media and technology industries, key cohorts for readership - and because New Zealand blogging is a preoccupation of mine I raise the subject a lot and quickly learn that very, very few people have heard of sites like Kiwiblog or Public Address. By contrast, I have never had a conversation about media in which people had never heard of the Dominion-Post or the New Zealand Herald - so it's hard to see how the former could be more popular than the latter.
I'm a scientist, and I'm inclined to accept statistics over anecdotal evidence. But when the statistics are this incredible - a quarter of the country reading blogs, more than the entire national population using trademe every month - you have to let common sense have a say.
One of the nice things about working in a university is that when you're confused about something you can wander down the corridor and ask an expert. A friend in Computer Science who has done work on the university web site advised:
there are many problems with the unique visitor stat. Here is one: most libraries, internet cafes, schools, universtities and businesses have a security policy that deletes cookies and other internet files when users log off. This prevents the hard drives filling up. These cookies are how unique visitors are tracked. So if you are a TradeMe junkie visiting the site twice a day every day at your local internet cafe or workplace but the cookie is getting deleted each time then at the end of the month you will show up as 60 “unique” visitors. This is an extreme example but from our in house tests it is not unusual for unique visitors to be out by a factor of 20.
My understanding is that unique visitors are fairly accurate over short periods of time - 1 to 2 days - but then get increasingly inaccurate over time as problems like cookie deletion kick in, until by the end of the month you are orders of magnitude out.
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And yes it is remarkable that a small group of blogs can have an audience of 1.3 million (which is substantiallly larger than that of all NZ newspapers).
I'd replace the word remarkable with the word unbelievable.
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So - just to get this straight - you do find it plausible that Scoop and a handful of New Zealand blogs are being read by 1.3 million people, and that TradeMe really has 4.6 million visitors/month?