Kiwiblog

I’ve now got comparisons from Neilsen for NZers who read Kiwiblog vs all NZers who are online.

• Gender – 52% Male KB vs 42% NZ
• Age – similar profile
• Household Income – 30% $40 – $100k KB vs 36% NZ, 34% $100k – $250k KB vs $28% NZ and 7% over $250k KB vs 4%
• Occupation – similar profile
• Location – Auckland 32% vs 34%, Wellington 28% vs 18%, Canterbury 15% vs 14%, Otago 5% v 4%
• Area – 86% urban KB vs 82% NZ
• Ethnicity – NZ European 80% KB vs 76% NZ, Maori 4%, vs 4% PI 2% vs 2%, Other European 7% vs 10%, Asian 2% vs 4%
• Internet Connection – 1% dial up KB vs 3% NZ
• Average Internet use – 36% up to 10 hours/week KB vs 50% NZ, 34% 10 – 20 vs 31%, 16% 20 – 30 vs 11% and 15% over 30 vs 10%
• Web 2.0 – 62% have used social network site vs 53%, 46% have commented n blog/discussion site vs 32%,
• Online Services – 86% use Internet Banking vs 83%, 34% have used VOIP calling vs 30%, 5% gambling vs 5%, 8% gaming vs 7%, 39% auctions vs 37%, 85% read newspaper vs 76%, 46% download or listen to music vs 37%, 28% listened to radio vs 19%, 60% download/view video vs 48%, 33% download/view TV or movie vs 26%, 41% download software vs 33%, 29% used RSS feed vs 18%, 30% monitored sports event vs 24%, 35% used IM vs 32%, 21% accessed Net via mobile phone vs 17%

Through my advertising network, I am on Nielsen Net Ratings. Apart from the normal stuff on page impressions, visitors, I also get a demographic breakdown of visitors to Kiwiblog. I figured people may be interested in them also.

• Gender – 52% Male, 48% Female (this is readers, not commenters)
• Age – 2% under 18, 21% 18 – 30, 28% 31 – 45, 31% 46 – 60 and 17% over 60
• Household Income – 15% under $40k, 30% $40 – $100K, 34% $100K – $250K and 7% over $250K
• Occupation – 23% professionals/managers, 9% self employed, 7% tertiary students, 3% secondary students, 7% retired
• Employers – 32% work for employers with less than 20 staff, 15% for 20 to 100 and 29% over 100
• Homes – 39% own with a mortgage, 31% own and no mortgage, 25% rent
• Children – 14% have children aged under 5, 13% 5 to 9, 13% 10 – 14, 13% 15 – 17, 63% no children at home
• Shopping – 44% say main household shopper, 39% say split equally, 17% say not primarily them
• Location – Auckland 32%, Wellington 28%, Canterbury 15%, Otago 5%, Waikato 4%, BOP 3%, Manawatu-Wanganui 3%, Northland 2%, Nelson/Marlborough 2%, Hawke’s Bay 1%, Southland 1%, Taranaki 1%, Gisborne 0.3%
• Area – 86% urban, 14% rural
• Ethnicity – NZ European 80%, Maori 4%, PI 2%, Other European 7%, Asian 2%
• Internet Access – 32% work, 63% home
• Internet Connection – 1% dial up, 97% broadband
• Average Internet use – 36% up to 10 hours/week, 34% 10 – 20, 16% 20 – 30 and 15% over 30
• Web 2.0 – 62% have used social network site, 46% have commented n blog/discussion site,
• Online Services – 86% use Internet Banking, 34% have used VOIP calling, 5% gambling, 8% gaming, 39% auctions, 85% read newspaper, 46% download or listen to music, 28% listened to radio, 60% download/view video, 33% download/view TV or movie, 41% download software, 29% used RSS feed, 30% monitored sports event, 35% used IM, 21% accessed Net via mobile phone,

What would be interesting is to see how Kiwblog readers differ from the average online Kiwi.

Good God I made 16 posts yesterday. Fridays are meant to be relaxed!

I’ve been so busy the last couple of months that I’ve not had time to update the demerits table. This is actually a quite slow process as I was recording the date of every infringement etc.

To make it a more manageable job, I’ve set up a demerits spreadsheet, and will just copy and paste this to the demerits page.

The good news for those with a history of demerits, is I have wiped all current demerits, as I have been failing to keep the table up to date.

At of today, everyone is at zero demerits. However those who have previously has suspensions, still have that history – ie if they get suspended again, it will be for more than one week.

The bad news for those who become abusive or disruptive, is that it is going to be easier for people to report such behaviour:

If you see a comment that you think is highly abusive, then feel free to report it by sending an e-mail to kiwiblogabuse@gmail.com. The e-mail should include a link to the specific comment (if you click on the date/time of the comment, this will bring it up in the address bar).

I do not have time to read every thread, let alone every comment. So your help in maintaining standards is appreciated. I also do not have time to respond to every complaint – they will all be considered, and you’ll see below whether or not I decide demerits are warranted. Generally I won’t respond individually.

I am going to be putting a few minutes aside every evening to review any complaints, and decide if any action is required. The dedicated e-mail address will ensure they don’t disappear in the black hole that is my main inbox.

Thanks to Mobify, Inspire Net and No Shortcuts Design, there is now a mobile phone version of Kiwiblog.

The URL is http://m.kiwiblog.co.nz and it is customised for better viewing on mobile phones, and to use up less bandwidth. The sidebars are gone, and the photos are smaller. If you are on the mobile site, you can click through to the full site at the top right.

At this stage we have not set it up for auto-detect, as I am assuming people are happy enough to choose the full or mobile site for themselves. But can do so, if people want it.

Kiwiblog is seven years old today. Over those seven years, there have been approx:

• 17,000 posts
• 600,000 comments
• 3,300 tags
• 5,700 registered commenters

Monitoring visits is more difficult as have swapped systems often. But over just the last two years, Kiwiblog has had:

• 12 million page views
• 5.5 million visits
• 1.9 million visits through Google

Thanks to all the readers who enjoy Kiwiblog – I enjoy writing it.

I’m a bit gutted to be away when Wordcamp NZ is on. Wordcamp is for users and fans of WordPress, which is what this blog uses.

I would have loved to attend (7 and 8 August in Auckland) as I know I’d pick up heaps of good ideas for plugins and features etc.

There is talk there may be one in Wellington later this year or early next year. I hope so.

The Herald had this story last week:

BLOG HEAVEN

Kiwiblog has increased unique users 43 per cent in the past two years _ a much bigger increase than that recorded for Public Address.

Figures released by Nielsen Online research for June 24 show the National Party friendly blog increased from 33,548 in May 2008 to 48,067 for the same date in 2010.

The liberal and Labour friendly community Public Address increased from 16,471 to 18,545, an increase of 13 per cent.

Kiwiblog dominates the mainstream right of centre political market, while Public Address shares the left with several bloggers.

Kiwiblog owner David Farrar said that commercial returns from political blogging were small unless they were international in scope or focused on the US market.

What I found funny is I was totally unaware of this stat until the NZ Herald rang me asking me for comment on it. I leave pretty much all the advertising to Scoop and Ffunnell and just have a browse through the quarterly reports every three months.

I used to follow my stats monthly, but look at Google Analytics rarely now. So I had no idea that traffic had increased by 43% over two years. Especially pleasing is that it hasn’t dropped away with the change of Government, but has in fact grown.

A new commenter left the following comment:

Oh what a surprise! The National and ACT party’s long term plan of having Banks as Mayor of the so called ‘Super City’ kicks into action as soon as Len Brown shows up 11% ahead of failed MP Banks. Oh another surprise, the horrible geeky little man ( being generous there) Farrar is doing Keys and Hides dirty work for them, just like he did on Winston Peters in the election. Well Farrar, time to exercise a few skeletons out of your cupboard, as well as Banks, Key and Hide. Just wait and see what starts popping up on the internet in the next few weeks, maybe a long term trip to Rarotonga would be well timed, or would Thailand be a better choice for you Farrar?

I deleted the comment, but then decided maybe better to let people see it.

The Thailand suggestion is especially charming, as we know what he is really suggesting by this.

Now here is my dilemma. I know the identity of the person who made that comment, through their e-mail address and domain name, with his threats against me. Kiwiblog’s privacy policy says:

I reserve the right to use or publicise any of the above information. However, unless there is good reason, I intend to only publish information in summarised form …

So the bottom line in terms of privacy in browsing or commenting on this site, is that in 99.99% of all cases I will keep your personal information strictly confidential to me. However if you break the law, defame someone, or really piss me off, then you have been warned!

So should I name the person who made this comment? Does this qualify as the 0.01% exception?

Has been a year since my last summary of blog poll results. They are of course fun, not scientific. The results are:

1. Only 17% said Richard Worth should remain as an MP
2. 66% said David Shearer’s majority will be smaller than Helen Clark’s
3. 16% of respondents use Twitter (June 2009)
4. 58% agreed owners of safer cars should pay lower ACC levies
5. 85% opposed the proposed requirement to add folic acid to bread
6. 58% have smoked cannabis
7. The favourite guest posters were Jadis 42%,  Tara Te Heke 29%, Peter Gibbons 24%
8. With regard to mining on conservation land 50% said consider on case by case basis, 34% said drill baby drill and 16% said never allow
9. 62% want a 4 year term for Parliament, 28% 3 years, 7% 5 years, and 3% 2 years
10. 72% said Whanganui should be spelt Wanganui
11. 34% change their razor blade less often than monthly, 31% monthly, 18% fortnightly, 16% weekly and 1% more than once a week
12. 59% use Facebook, 21% Twitter, 9% Bebo and 7% My Space (Oct 2009)
13. 47% support MMP, 23%, STV, 20% FPP, 6% SM and 4% PV
14. 81% want competition for ACC
15. 35% wants Police able to take DNA samples from those charged with a serious crime so long as the sample is destroyed if no conviction. 16% support DNA samples taken at birth.
16. 50% named Chris Carter as the biggest trougher, 20% Hone Harawira, 18% Rodney Hide and 12% Bill English
17. 76% wanted the Maori Party to expel Hone Harawira over his MF comments
18. 55% think CIRs should be binding on Parliament
19. 61% think Kevin Rudd will beat Tony Abbott
20. 56% said for Xmas they were holidaying at home, 40% holidaying in NZ and 13% holidaying overseas
21. 51% think Cameron Slater is not guilty
22. 43% want Charles as King, 18% for William to take over, and 39% want a republic
23. 43% think there should be no minimum wage, 18% say it should be $15, 11% more than $15, 9% $12.50, 7% $13.00, 7% $12.75, 5% $14.00
24. The PM’s statement was given an A by 19%, a B by 29%, a C by 23%, a D by 125 and an E by 17%
25. 62% support a lower minimum wage for under 20s
26. 32% want a driving age of 18, 22% 16, 22% 15, 18% 17 and 6% 14
27. 82% hate the proposed Wellywood sign
28. 62% wanted the Govt to remove the ban on mining on Great Barrier Island
29. 65% want retail shops to be able to open on Easter Sunday
30. 84% think Superman would beat the Hulk (they are wrong – Hulk gets stronger as he gets madder)
31. 64% thought David Cameron would become UK PM, 23% Gordon Brown and 13% Nick Clegg
32. 34% think Andrew Little will be the next Labour Leader, 24% David Cunliffe, 18% Shane Jones, 8% Grant Robertson, 8% Trevor Mallard, 6% Maryan Street and 2% Ruth Dyson
33. 42% want the alcohol purchase age to be 18, 40% wants 20, 9% greater than 20 and 9% under 18
34. 58% would vote to retain MMP
35. 31% rated the 2010 Budget very good, 36% good, 14% average, 6% poor and 13% very poor
36. 47% say Andy Haden should be sacked and 53% say he shoudl keep his job

I must do these summaries more often!

Starting from next week, we’re going to have a new premium content system for comments on Kiwiblog.

Readers will be able to access posts my me for free, as per normal. That will not change.

But if you wish to read or make a comment, there will be a small micro-charge, as a contribution towards the running costs of the blog.

The comments will be behind a premium content firewall, and there will be three levels of access:

1. Bronze – Read only – $1/month
2. Silver – Ability to make up to three comments a day – $2/month
3. Gold – Ability to make up to 30 comments a day – $3/month

We’ll be using paypal primarily as the method of payment, as most people already have a paypal account. Credit cards will also be okay, but at this stage we can’t do automatic payment or direct debits.

The money from comments access will primarily be used to fund professional discussion board software that will allow easy moderation, tracking of all comments from an author, most popular comments highlighted and a few extra features you’ll see next week.

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.