Kiwiblog

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.

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?

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.

Just been told that Monteiths are giving away a free case of (24 stubbies) beer to the best commenters on blogs in the Ffunnell advertising network, that contribute to their Worth Talking Over site.

Their site grabs contributions from the various blogs, and puts them into speech bubbles, as a way of highlighting the debates. The site is very well done – in fact it pulls contents from blogs. from Twitter and even the old Usenet groups.

Anyway what it means is I get to pick a commenter who will get two dozen stubbies as a prize. Sadly I can not pick myself

If Expat can send me by e-mail their name, address, phone and a statement they are aged over 18 (this is a legal requirement), then they will get a pleasant delivery in a few days.

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.

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!

Don’t really need a drum roll, as people could see the results in the sidebar up until closing, but here goes.

The 2009 Kiwiblog MP of the Year is Lockwood Smith. Lockwood was always a hot favourite with rave reviews from the gallery and others for his efforts to make question time more relevant, and opening up MPs expenses to public scrutiny. Lockwood won 49% of the vote.  Police and Corrections Minister was 2nd on 22%.

The 2009 Kiwiblog National MP of the Year is Steven Joyce. An impressive performance for a first term MP. His swift decision making on much needed national roads of significance has made him the motorists fan, as well as his steady decision making on the fibre to the home project. Steven got 39% of the vote, with Judith Collins in 2nd place on 28%.

Kiwiblog readers voted John Key the 2009 Kiwiblog Labour MP of the Year. Some readers will have voted him the best Labour MP tongue in cheek, while others will be sending a message that they want more right and less centre. The PM got 40% of the vote, with new MP David Shearer in 2dn place on 14%. Were readers giving Shearer esteem for his massive win in the by-election, or because they like his defence privatisation essays?

The 2009 Kiwiblog Minor Party MP of the Year is Tariana Turia. The Maori Party co-leader got 39% of the vote, with John Boscawen on 29%. Turia in the mid 1990s was one of the most polarising figures in NZ politics. It shows how successful her efforts have been, that in 2009 she can win a poll amongst the generally conservative readership to be the Minor Party MP of the Year.

The 2009 Kiwiblog Press Gallery Journalist of the Year is John Armstrong. John won 45%, narrowly pipping out Jane Clifton on 39%.  Note this is the public poll of Kiwiblog readers. A separate poll of MPs and Press Secretaries on the press gallery will be published on Thursday or Friday. John is probably the most cited journalist online – not because people always agree with him, but because he provides analysis (not just reporting) almost every day.

Finally we have the 2009 Kiwiblog Public Servant of the Year and it is a tribute to Dame Margaret Bazley who got 48% of the vote, with Don Brash in second place at 38%. Lawyers have never been the most popular species, and the average pundit enjoyed her expose of the legal aid problems.

Note that despite me telling people not to do it, one Xtra user tried voting around 80 times in most categories. These show up in the logs like a flashing light, and those votes were deleted.

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.

Yes it is time for the annual Kiwiblog Awards. The categories are:

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

Make your nominations below, and then I’ll announce the finalists and run a poll in each category. These are all positive awards – for the best person in each category.

2008 winners are not eligible to be nominees for 2009. Here are the 2008 and 2007 winners for each category.

1. MP of the Year – Rodney Hide (2008), John Key (2007)
2. Labour MP of the Year – Winston Peters, Phil Goff
3. National MP of the Year – John Key, Bill English
4. Minor Party MP of the Year – Rodney Hide, Heather Roy
5. Press Gallery Journalist of the Year – Audrey Young, Fran O’Sullivan
6. Public Servant of the Year – Owen Glenn, Kevin Brady

Google must have its bots hovering constantly. Last night I blogged something, then thought I’d seek more info on the topic so googled it. My own blog post came up as a hit, less than 60 seconds after I had made it.

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 on Great Barrier Island for the weekend. As usual, blogging will be somewhere between limited and non-existent.

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.