Bloggers on Blogging: Part 5

Yay! One of my faves, Alison at Creekside, has joined the party.

Follow her on Twitter.

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Blogging

I loved it. I loved that we were citizen journalists and pamphleteers. I loved that we were rigorous and funny.

I loved kicking ass and taking names. I loved spending days researching and calling out what our 90+% Con-fluffing media owners lacked in both reporter hours and inclination to report on. And I loved the attention.

I loved Holly Stick or Beijing York or other bloggers rocking up the comments with links to what I had missed or gotten entirely wrong because, as @trapdinawrpool says below, credibility was our only currency and we all defended it fiercely on each other's behalf.

I loved that bloggers knew each other's interests well enough to quietly pass on stories/data to whomever had excelled in that particular niche.

I loved the camaradarie across political lines.  I loved that out here on the Wet Coast we got together in real life in various combinations of political bent and butted heads and made friendships as people.

It was of course the nine year reign of Stephen Harper and the rise of the right that galvanized many of  us into blogging in the first place - that and the realization that money and lots of it had more to do with the inner workings of our neoliberal corporate-captured governments than whatever pap we had been inculcated with about progress and democracy in our youth.

Now Harper is head of the global IDU, the right has gotten pointier, and blogging has been replaced by the silos of Faceplant and the relentless context-free scattershot weaponization of data on twitter.

When blogger/researcher The Sixth Estate quit blogging three years ago, he asked - in a rhetorical analogy to people - why the cape buffalo and hippos in Africa did not rise up together against the lions who killed and ate them. Three years later the lions are unhappily sharing the same slowly sinking life raft with the cape buffalo and the hippos. We're still the lions though, the lions reassure each other quietly, their claws sinking ever deeper into the life raft.

OK, where the hell was I going with this lions business? Oh yeah. The lions are not going to listen to us - not as bloggers or tweeters or Faceplanters. That blogger camaraderie to make common cause wherever and however you find it now -- as in life, that's what counted all along about blogging .

Creekside: RoboCon Time Capsule

Or, What We Knew and When We Knew It.

Spoiler alert: Way back.

Pssst: If you don't have Creekside in your blog-roll or bookmarks, why the hell not?

Gotcha!

As my long-suffering friends and relations will tell you, I'm kinda tedious on the subject of how the Internet is changing politics.

Well, look who agrees. Antonia Z.

Call it the hive mind, swarm intelligence, maybe collective consciousness.

Really, what’s happening online with the so-called “robo-call” scandal is all about crowdsourcing the story.

Posts and comments on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, alternative websites and even corporate media are bouncing off each other, adding to the mass of allegations of election wrongdoing by the Conservative party.

And it's not just what's happening now.

She pointedly points out that bloggers have been on this since the minute the polls closed, citing the Essential Alison and in particular, her blogpost on the margin of victory from May 5, 2011.

Continuing on with how the story is now being amplified, she quotes -- ooooo! -- DJ!'s own deBeauxOs.

For example, when news of Elections Canada’s investigation of the “deceptive robo-calls” hit the headlines, it took over Twitter.

“Those of us who had tried to flag these U.S.-styled tactics (last year) responded with tweets linking to previous news stories and our blogs,” says Ottawa blogger DeBeauxOs of Dammit Janet.

Each fed off the other and boom. The story exploded.

And the feeding continues. Antonia has the grace -- a substance lacking in most MSM stenographers -- to credit the indefatigable Sixth Estate for his excellent ongoing compilation of reports and commentary thereon.

There is a quibble from Alice Funke of the Pundits' Guide. She says that all this yammering on the Tubz may be 'muddying the waters'.

Um. No. We are propelling the War Canoe.

Funke worries that muddying and confusion is playing into the Stevie Peevie's evil plans.

Plan? This is planned?

Ha. The Contempt Party is in full-bore panic and scramble mode. (See: Del Mastro, Dean, passim.)

The upshot? As my friend and relations can tell you -- Utopia.

OK. Not quite.

That said, [Internet strategist and broadcaster Jesse] Hirsh thinks this scandal is just the beginning of crowdsourcing political news.

“What we’re seeing is a clear marking of this is how things are now done, and this is how things will be done going forward,” he says.

“And this may even be the last major political scandal because the only lesson a politico can take from all of this is, you’re going to get caught.”

Unlikely. But the blogosphere and twitterverse will have a grand time hunting the evil-doers down.