Kiwiblog

Going to be on an area with little or no Internet coverage until Tuesday, so lite blogging over the weekend. Have scheduled the general debates to appear each day.

A couple of people have commented to me that they are finding the daily general debate threads are being dominated by religious debates, which of course tend to never get resolved.

Their suggestion was that we have two general debate posts a day. One “General Religious Debate” and one “General Debate”, with the latter out of bounds for religious comments and debates.

I don’t spend a lot of time in General Debates myself, so unsure how much of an issue this is, and whether the proposed solution is necessary or preferred. On the face of it, it seems sensible and in fact it mirrors what we did on Usenet many years ago – set up a nz.soc.religion alongside nz.general.

South Australia goes to the polls on 20 March, and for 25 to 55 days before the election it will (arguably – see comments in previous thread) be illegal to comment on their elections without disclosing your name and postcode.

Even worse, blogs and media sites have to collect names and postcodes from all their commenters or risk being be fined.

Hopefully the law will be repealed or clarified before the election. If it is not though, I am happy to offer Kiwiblog as a temporary forum for discussion of the South Australian election if any Australian sites are worried about the new law. I can set up a general debate every day, or even give some Australian bloggers posting rights.

I have no intention of forcing commenters to give me their name and address/postcode.

As a non resident of Australia, they can not enforce their law on me.

As I said hopefully the law will be repealed. If it is not repealed, I suspect many Australians will ignore it anyway. But if it does result in people feeling they are unable to blog and comment on the state elections, I am happy to help host such discussions here. In fact I am sure many NZ blogs would be happy to adopt an Australian blog for a month. It could be a great trans-tasman initiative!

UPDATE: Heh I wrote this post last night and timed it for 9 am. In the interval, the South Australian Government has backed down and promised to repeal the law, as reported by No Right Turn. Excellent. The Government must have worked out how deeply unpopular it was going to be.

Interestingly the law can not be amended before the election, so the Government has said it will not be enforced and will be retrospectively repealed after the election.

The top UK blog Guido Fawkes just mentioned his stats for the last week, being 340,000 page views. That got me to do a quick compare, and KB had 121,000 page views.  As the UK has 15 times the population, I’m pretty chuffed to be at slightly more than one third the level of a (or the) top UK blog.

That then reminded me that I should check out and publish what the annual stats were so I just ran Google Analytics for the 2009 calendar year. Some stats:

• 2.68 million visits
• 6.00 million page views
• 680,000 visitors
• Average Time on Site 4:22
• Traffic Source is 35% direct URL, 24% links and 41% search engines

Top Inwards Links:

1. No Minister 85,000
2. Scoop 47,000
3. Whale Oil/Gotcha 39,000
4. The Standard 38,000
5. Public Address 33,000
6. Cactus Kate 22,000
7. Keeping Stock 17.000
8. Facebook 13,000
9. Roar Prawn 13,000
10. Twitter 11,000
11. Tumeke 10,000
12. No Right Turn 8,000
13. Dim Post 8.000
14. Stephen Franks 7,000
15. MacDoctor 6,000
16. Frog Blog 6,000
17. Red Alert 6,000
18. Kiwi Politico 4,500
19. Not PC 4,400
20. Lindsay Mitchell 4,300
21. Home Paddock 4,200
22. NZ Conservative 4,000
23. Poneke 3,900
24. Interest.co.nz 3,700
25. Barnsley Bill 3,600
26. Pundit 3,300
27. Ian Wishart 3,000
28. TVHE 2,900
29. Monkeys with Typewriters 2,900

Visits per ISP:

1. Telecom 796,000
2. Telstra-Clear 399,000
3. Vodafone 173,000
4. Callplus 70,000
5. Orcon 104,000
6. Worldxchange 42,000
7. Woosh 35,000
8. Iconz 20,000
9. Maxnet 20,000
10. VUW 15,000
11. MSD 11,000
12. FX 10,000
13. MOJ 18,000
14. APN 8,000
15. TVNZ 5,000
16. Treasury 5,000
17. Air NZ 4,500
18. ANZ 4,500
19. Fonterra 4,000
20. Min Ed 4,000

Top Search Terms:

1. Kiwiblog 127,000
2. Whale Oil 19,000
3. Cactus Kate 10,300
4. David Farrar 9,200
5. NZ entertainer name suppression 4,300
6. Pearl Going 4,000
7. Phil Ure 3,900
8. Clayton Weatherston 3,700
9. Cathy Oxxxxx 3,200
10. David Bain 3,000
11. Cameron Slater 2,800
12. Louise Crome 2,700
13. Karen Soich 2,200
14. Noelle McCarthy 2,200
15. multinationals threaten our economic and political sovereignty 2,200
16. Susan Boyle 2,100
17. Lisa Lewis 1,700
18. Sophie Elliott 1,600
19. Neelam Choudary 1,500
20. Meg Bates 1,400

Top Pages Visited:

1. Blogroll 125,000
2. Must Read Blogs 69,000
3. The poor entertainer 21,000
4. Do you know 20,000
5. About KB 14,000
6. Comedians line up to say no 10,000
7. David Bain case 7,500
8. David Bain coverage 6,800
9. Richard Worth resigns 6,300
10. Clayton Weatherston 5,000

Top search terms that includes sex used to find Kiwiblog:

1. group sex video 681
2. sex shop k road auckland 412
3. animal sex 213
4. casual sex 176
5. bridget saunders sex 157
6. goat sex 149
7. banned sex videos 129
8. more on green sex for votes plan 126
9. comedian charged with committing a sexual offence 112
10. sex 106

This week and next I’m at a remote beach which has very poor Internet connection. I’m basically logging in just twice a day for around half an hour each time – usually once to read the news, and once to do some posts.

Do not expect me to be reading or responding to comments during this time – it is just too hard. If you really have to, you can e-mail me, but to be blunt I’d rather you don’t unless it is urgent, until the 18th.

Almost 800 people voted in the year end poll to select a charity for 2010. The results were:

1. Fred Hollows Foundation 46%
2. CanTeen 18%
3. SPCA 14%
4. Alzheimers New Zealand Incorporated 13%
5. New Zealand Red Cross 9%

Now all five finalists are very worth charities, and over time I hope we can support them all, but for 2010 the Fred Hollows Foundation was the clear favourite with over two and a half times the support of the next charity.

Later in January I’ll detail some of the fund-raising ides for how we can support the Fred Hollows Foundation.

In early November I blogged calling for nominations from readers for the Kiwiblog 2010 charity. There were roughly about 80 nominations which makes me think this is something really positive to fuel some great offline events and fundraising. More about these plans in the New Year, but basically there will be four components:

1. 10% of gross advertising revenues to go to the charity
2. Online link to dedicated donation page, and updates on charity’s work
3. A number of fun offline events as fundraisers
4. Seeking businesses interesting in doing matching donations

I narrowed the nominations down to a five organisation short-list based on the original criteria I stated:

1. Charity must be based in NZ (but can have international focus)
2. Should have broad appeal, and be relatively apolitical
3. Should have national relevance, not local only, and be topical
4. Should actually deliver services of some kind, not just advocacy
5. Should be reportable – as in the ability to keep people interested in the work they do with regular updates

Those that did not make this year’s shortlist are not necessarily out of contention for future years.

It is now time to put this short-list to a public poll.

Please use the poll in the blog sidebar to indicate your choice for the 2010 charity. Voting closes at midnight on New Years Eve.  2010 candidates in alphabetical order are:

• Alzheimers New Zealand Incorporated
• CanTeen
• Fred Hollows Foundation
• New Zealand Red Cross
• SPCA

Please remember that this process is designed to select a charitable beneficiary by majority vote from the community here. It is pointless for the vote to be skewed by what we can only call “campaigning” as the cause needs to be one that feels right for the people who naturally assemble here!

All five charities are great causes, and I expect over time many of them, if not all of them, will get to be Charity of the Year at some stage – if the concept proves worthwhile by having people get behind it.

Happy Voting!

Voting is now open in the 2009 Kiwiblog Awards in the following categories:

1. MP of the Year
2. Labour MP of the Year
3. National MP of the Year
4. Minor Party MP of the Year
5. Press Gallery Journalist of the Year
6. Public Servant of the Year

You can vote in all six polls in the left sidebar. Multiple voting will be deleted and exposed.

Have installed (thanks to Inspire) a new plugin. You can vote a rating up or down, as before. But there are now some consequences to it.

Comments with lots of positive ratings get highlighted. I have set the threshold for now to 5. I may need to raise it. I don’t want too many highlighted – just those which get lots of people saying this is great.

Comments with lots of negative ratings gets hidden – you can still read them if you want by clicking on them, but it allows you to skip over them. Now I have set the threshold at 10 negative comments, as I don’t want lots of comments hidden. I will increase this if people are voting comments down just because they may not agree with a comment, as opposed to it being a comment of poor quality. There is a huge difference.

Ideally I want a plugin where each reader could choose their own thresholds, but the one time I tried that it crashed the system as 500,000 comments and 5,000 users is too much for it. We’ll see how this goes. Remember nothing is blocked – it is just requires a click to view.

Also comments with lost of both positive and negative ratings also get highlighted as a hot debate comment. The threshold is a total of 12 votes (both positive and negative). Again I’ll revise this an necessary.

Also the sidebar now displays not just the most recent comments, but the more highly ranked ones.

Feedback, as always, welcome.

I’m travelling for a wee while from today. Most of the time should still be blogging a bit, but to keep the posts flowing, I’ve got some guest bloggers again.

As I blogged previously, in 2010, Kiwiblog is going to sponsor a charity, and I hope that the community that reads and comments here, will also get in behind a good cause. I see it as part of translating an online community into having a real world effect – like with the campaign against the Electoral Finance Act, but this time in a non political sphere.

Kiwiblog will be donating 10% of its advertising income to the charity, and we had a great brain storming session this week about possible fun events we could put on such as celebrity debates, political trivia quiz nights, sporting event sponsorship, celebrity dares, bingo nights etc etc. We’ll chat about these some other time.

For now, I’d like readers to nominate charities for consideration. I’ll then select a short-list, and we’ll put the short-list to a public vote amongst the readers.

The criteria we’ll apply in selecting a short-list are:

1. Charity must be based in NZ (but can have international focus)
2. Should have broad appeal, and be relatively apolitical
3. Should have national relevance, not local only, and be topical
4. Should actually deliver services of some kind, not just advocacy
5. Should be reportable – as in the ability to keep people interested in the work they do with regular updates

So nominate away. I’ll keep nominations open for a couple of weeks and then we’ll run a poll to pick the 2009 charity.

We had comment No 500,000 made this morning. Pete George clocked up the milestone.

Hate to think how many words that represents. Let’s just say lots.

I blogged back in April on an idea:

I’m a big believer in helping charities. Hell, I worked for the Red Cross for four years and it is amazing at how much can be done for sometimes not a lot of money. One or two staff can get water supplied to camps of thousands etc. Kiwis are great at giving up so much time and money to help others.

There are many great charities. SPCA, Women’s Refuge are a couple I always donate to. And all the cancer ones. Plus of course you get phoned all the time now asking for donations to other charities and you give a bit more often than not.

Anyway what I have been thinking is it would be great if the community that forms around a blog, can be used to support one particular charity in a really significant way.

I proposed five steps:

1. See if people think the idea has merit
2. Try and get a small number of volunteers on board to help organise things
3. Ask people to nominate various charities for inclusion in a poll, to be Kiwiblog Charity for 2009. Probably have some criteria for shortlisting.
4. Have readers vote on preferred charity from the short list. We’ll rotate it every year, so missing out is not permanent.
5. Then over a year, undertake a range of activities for the charity, with some possibilities below:

There was excellent feedback, so No 1 is done. I now want to move to Step 2.

The organisational side is going to be a lot simpler than I feared, due to the kind offer of partnership by Give A Little. They have all the tools and widgets to make it really easy.

What I want to do now is have a get together on Monday (after work) with people who are keen to form a sort of organising committee for the initiative. Basically to discuss:

1. Shortlist criteria
2. Possible events/ideas as fundraisers
3. Potential partners

If you are interested in helping out, let me know. At this stage the time commitment is very modest, but as we progress into next year there might be a reasonable amount of organising to be done – possibly quiz nights, celebrity debates, sponsoring a Kiwiblog team (including me) for a half marathon etc etc.

We’ll probably get together at 5.30 pm Monday (at the Backbencher) for an initial chat.

I’m too busy this week to spend time moderating threads to ensure only real names are used for the proposed three day trial. So the trial is postponed until some stage in October.

Next week I am going to try another experiment with the comments for two or three days. As with the last experiment, I do not intend to change my commenting policy in the near future, so don’t worry overly. Any future  changes will be well signalled and discussed.

What I am interested in is seeing what happens, when I try different things.

For three days next week (Monday 28 to Wednesday 30 September), comments will only be allowed under people’s real names – except in the general debate.

I will give people a one comment warning in case they forget.

Now, if you do not want to post under your real name, then just don’t comment outside the general debates for three days.

If you do want to comment during those three days and are not already commenting under your own name, then there are two easy ways to do so:

1. Login as normal and go to your Profile Page. Enter your first name and last name and click Update Profile. Then go up to “Display name publicly as” and select your name and click Update Profile again.

   Note that it probably will be possible for people to link your previous comments, to your name (as it shows no of comments for the user) , so do not do this option if this is undesirable

2. Just register a new username. Normally the system will not allow you to use the same e-mail address, but I have turned that off, so just set up a new user account under your name. You will then have two accounts you can use in the future as you wish to.

The reason I am doing this experiment is to examine two things:

1. Is there a reduction in trolling, abuse and flaming if people are commenting under their own name.
2. How much of a reduction in number of comments occurs

Again this is for just three days, and general debates during that time will remain open to all.

And before someone asks, no obviously I won’t know in some cases if you are using a fake name. But on the other hand, I may know!

Several readers have alerted me to a Google warning about possible malware on Kiwiblog. I have had the same warning myself.

I have asked my ISP to check things out. It is possible that we have been reported as unsafe due to another site in the same netblock.

If you think Kiwiblog is safe, and want to turn the warnings off, you can do so under security options. I have done so as it was preventing me from editing comments.

I’ll update as I learn more.

UPDATE: There was some malware through a weakness in the Ajax Comments plugin. It has been upgraded which should prevent a recurrence. Bloody criminals.

I’ve just created blog polls for the front bench for the third time. Previous polls were done in March and May/June. Voting is open until Friday midday.

A bug has hit by polls plugin and it no longer allows multiple polls to be shown at once in the sidebar. So I have set it to show one of the nine polls randomly. Each time you reload it should show another one at random so keep an eye on the sidebar as new ones come up, until you have done all nine. No multiple voting in the same poll – I do log IP addresses and can detect this.

I’m having a mid winter holiday for around a week and a half starting tomorrow morning.

Unlike most holidays where I still maintain a reasonable level of blogging, on this one it is likely to be infrequent as I’ll actually be on a cruise ship for a week. Internet access will probably be patchy and expensive, plus more importantly I will hopefully have more fun things to do!

However so you don’t get too bored waiting for infrequent posts from me, I have recruited four mystery guest bloggers who will all be posting during my holiday. I’ll leave it to each of them to introduce themselves once they start up.They’re all far better writers than me, so I hope you’ll enjoy their contributions.

The moderation experiment has ended. Note this does not mean anything goes – the existing comments policy and demerits scheme still applies.

Feedback is sought and welcome on what you thought of the change during the four days – the pros and cons, any suggestions for future etc.

For four days (Mon 27 Aug Jul to Thu 30 Aug Jul) A temporary set of rules will apply as an experiment. The daily general debate will continue to be largely a free for all (subject to existing rules for extreme abuse, defamation etc). All other threads will be moderated/censored and posts that are even moderately offtopic, trollish, abusive will be deleted or edited. Demerits will not be given (unless comment is really over the top) during the experiment – the sanction will merely be the comment goes.

General rule to avoid trouble – respond to the topic and to arguments, don’t get personal.

Normal rules will apply from Friday. No immediate decision will be made about a long-term change. This is just an experiment with no per-determined outcome.

The HOS reports:

The Solicitor General’s office is investigating whether internet bloggers and social networking sites have breached contempt of court laws in the Sophie Elliott trial. …

Solicitor General spokeswoman Jan Fulstow said on Thursday the office was considering what action to take over a Facebook group called “Clayton Weatherston is a Murderer. He committed murder, not manslaughter” as well as comments on David Farrar’s Kiwiblog.

I commented to the HOS:

Kiwiblog creator David Farrar said he was generally “careful to avoid commenting on trials while under way”.

He gave the Bain trial as an example of him saving commentary until after the jury retired.

“In the Weatherston trial, the basic facts are not in dispute,” he said.

“Hence, there is no dispute about innocence – only whether or not he is found guilty of murder or manslaughter – a decision for the jury guided by the Judge. I understand jurors are usually specifically warned to not read information on the internet about the case.

“As I have done in other cases, if I am asked to delete comments that may be prejudicial, I will generally do so.

I think it is fair to say though that my anger at the fact the victim seems to being blamed for the murder, may have led me to not being as cautious as I should have been.

I am unsure as to what are the limits of acceptable discussion on criminal issues. Should you just not comment during the trial, any time after depositions, or any time after arrest?

If someone is found guilty I presume you can then comment, but what if they then lodge an appeal?

Anyway as I don’t wish to end up in judicial trouble, my interim policy is now going to be to now have any discussions on criminal issues except in a general law reform sense. In a way it is a pity because we actually have several defence lawyers comment here and I find their contributions welcome.

As I said I am genuinely unsure where the line should be drawn, and would welcome any advice on this. In the Veitch case we saw details published in Sunday newspapers for weeks on end, and that did not appear to be an issue.

Maybe there is no hard and fast boundary as to when you can or can not comment online, or as to what you can say, but perhaps a useful initiative would be the creation of a plain English guide for bloggers etc on what they can and can not comment on in terms of criminal justice issues. This could go on either Crown Law or Ministry of Justice website. I know I would find such a document bloody useful, and I suspect so would many others.  Unlike commercial media we don’t have lawyers on call.

Am in a board meeting most of Wednesday so no blogging until late afternoon probably.

Well the latest poll on David Bain set a record – 1,173 votes.

49% of people said they disagreed with the verdict and 46% said they agreed with the verdict. 6% supported the theory that Robin killed the kids, and then David killed Robin.

However the 46% who supported the verdict were divided on why – 24% said David probably did it, but there was reasonable doubt. 13% said they had no idea who did it, and only 9% said Robin did it.

Previous blog poll results, since the last update are:

1. The 2009 budget had 51% rate it good or very good, 33% poor or very poor and 16% neutral.
2. On the possibility of tax cuts going, 37% said they would only be slightly upset as the recession has forced it, 20% said they would be very pissed, 18% totally furious, 17% only reasonably pissed if postponed only and 8% hate tax cuts so glad they were cancelled.
3. 58% approved of Christine Rankin’s appointment and 42% did not
4. 76% disapproved of the appointment of Michael Cullen to the NZ Post Board
5. 47% said National should postpone future tax cuts
6. 60% think possession of cannabis for personal use should be a criminal offence
7. 90% backed the restoration of titular honours
8. 57% supported sinking the Sea Shepherd over the Japanese Whalers
9. Least desired city to be forced to live in was Wanganui at 44%, Palm Nth 32%, Hamilton 16%, New Plymouth 9%
10. 54% have downloaded a TV show not yet available in NZ
11. 76% blamed Hamas for the deaths in Gaza
12. 38% said 2009 will be better than 2008, 28% said it will not be and 34% said it will be only if we get the chance to boot Winston out again.
13. 51% said they would rather go without the Internet for a fortnight and 49% would rather go without sex.
14. 71% supported the use of urgency to pass laws before Xmas.
15. 11% are missing Winston
16. Only 46% think Goff will lead Labour into the 2011 election
17. 75% had a favourable impression of the new Ministry
18. 38% said the best part of election night was a clear National/Act majority, 27% Winston losing, 23% Helen resigning, 11% did not enjoy it and 3% the electorates National won
19. 57% said they were voting National, 26% ACT, 7% Labour, 5% Greens
20. 48% have voted for Labour at a previous election
21. 47% supported extending the retail bank guarantee to wholesale borrowing, 30% did not and 23% said follow the experts.

Over at the ffunnell site, you can ask questions about Telecom’s new XT Mobile Network. Just ask away, and you should get a response straight away.

ffunnell is something you may hear more of. It is the online media advertising network for some of the larger independent online publishers. They include:

• Scoop
• Geekzone
• Kiwiblog
• Public Address
• Throng
• Pundit
• Kimberley Crossman

There will be more details on this over time for interested advertisers. The network has an audience of 1.3 million unique browsers a month and 1 million page views a week.

I did a post around 9 pm last night on Jim Anderton and his ipredict price. Somohow Wordpress has deleted the post. Does anyone have a copy in their RSS feed or cache that they can send me so I don’t have to retype it all in?