Written By: - Date published: 2:47 pm, May 24th, 2009 - 109 comments
Categories: blogs, dpf, humour, interweb -
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No, not because we’ve overtaken Kiwiblog in readership just yet (although ours is growing at a healthy 10% a month) but because I don’t think we can call Kiwiblog a political blog any more.
1) A blog is meant to be writers giving their views on issues; a web-based log of their thoughts, if you will. If you read Kiwiblog, you’ll have noticed there a lot of cut and paste jobs. I did some of my own cutting and pasting – Kiwiblog’s front page into Word – and learned that 74% of the words were quoted from another source. Entire posts have no words from DPF apart from “The Herald reports”. So, rather than a blog, Kiwiblog might be described as a news aggregator.
2) Just 6 of 25 posts on the front page contained any political analysis beyond the level of quoting someone else and saying “indeed”. It’s normal to see the occasional political post in a non-political blog. So if we’re still to consider Kiwiblog a blog, we shouldn’t think of it as a political one.
3) There are 3 posts that are actually just ads for David Farrar’s business interests – one each on Ffunnell, ipredict*, and Powershop. Each of them talks about the companies but fails to mention that Farrar has a financial interest in them. So, rather than being a blog, it’s more an exercise in embedded advertising.
Thus, we can now consider The Standard to be New Zealand’s most-read political blog. With our growth rate we were going to get there soon enough anyway, so it’s a little bit of a shame to take the crown by default. Still a win’s a win and they all look the same in the book.
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Gentle ribbing aside, did you see the fast one DPF pulled last week?
He put up a post noting that the ipredict stock on Jim Anderton announcing his retirement this year had been increasing and strongly suggesting that someone was buying with inside knowledge (which is all well and good). The stock rose further on that news. A couple of hours later DPF put up an update purporting to be an email from Jim Anderton saying he was not retiring. The stock crashed but, as he wrote, DPF had been able to get out first.
Deciding how to realise information to the market and when allowed DPF to make a tidy sum of money in a couple of hours. It seems that goes beyond the mere use of insider information, which is good in a predictions market, to actively manipulating the market, which is at least unethical.
You have to wonder too, who had pushed the stock up in the first place to lay the grounds for the bait and switch if there was no underlying truth to it. It could be that DPF pulled a pump and dump.
ipredict is DPF’s company If DPF wants to use his power as an information distributor to rip people off that’s his business but I’ve closed my ipredict account.
- Marty G
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100 and 1 comments on this thread
And I then gain the joy of the capcha: drench Frank
Capcha: cabinet cudgeled
Right now on the Standard:
First article: no text at all, simply a photo taken by an unknown photographer (and, of course, displayed with no credit)
Second article: links to posts at four other political commentators’ sites, over half the word count of the article is verbatim quotes.
Third article: photos taken by an unknown photographer (and, of course, displayed with no credit)
Fourth article: links to videos and photos at other media sites.
Fifth article: commentary by Eddie on the Auckland protests.
So, only one out of the first five articles on the Standard right now is original work.
You were saying?
It’s probably not my place to wade in here but dude, there’s no use defending Farrar. This is a day of heavy coverage of the hikoi, whereas Farrar does his recycled hackery thing every day.
First article is credited, it’s linked through to the tv3 story with original source material. It’s also clearly a humour piece.
Second article is explicitly a “hey, go look at these links” article and is the only one in probably the last week. Here it’s an exception, for Farrar it’s the rule.
Third article is credited to a reader. One would imagine they sent the photos in after the standard requested them in the previous post.
Fourth article is hikoi coverage, an exceptional circumstance as mentioned above.
Fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth articles today are all original commentary or analysis. For some reason you decided to stop at the fifth. There’s more analysis in these five than you’d find in a month of Farrar’s work.
In fact, you look at the previous week at the standard, and the one before, and you’ll find 80-90% of the posts are commentary or analysis. Farrar is day in, day out, 75% recycled hackery punctuated with the occasional “indeed”.
Epic FAIL, SHG.
I see that you are being very selective. Try looking over the whole of yesterday. There were 9 posts yesterday. So you carefully selected 5. I wonder why. Of course the hikoi was visual, so posts on that tended to focus on the video and photos. Many from people sending them in, and not wanting credit. Others related to articles in the same post.
I’d say you were just a spinner of selective bullshit. In PR are you?
Just started at the top of the front page and kept going until I hit original work. Turns out that was the fifth article.
If you look at Kiwiblog via google cache you can easily see hundreds of links to viagra and cialis sites hidden in the source code. This is a lot more embarrasing for DPF than any of the feeble, mostly false accusations in the parent post.