Tag: homophobia

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Talking Facebook regulation on Syn Radio

There was a bit of media interest in my opinion piece for ABC Drum Opinion on Facebook regulation, including an interview for Panorama on Melbourne’s SYN Radio.

While they do eventually put some items on their own website, it doesn’t seem to have appeared yet. So here it is for your listening pleasure.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:18 — 4.6MB)

[The Conversations category is where I post the unedited versions of interviews I do, or the various media spots I do which aren’t podcast elsewhere. If you’d like to grab all of them in the future, subscribe to the RSS feed.]

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Most popular posts of 2010

As the first of my new-year posts, here’s a list of the most-read posts from 2010.

  1. HTC Desire to OS X tethering via USB. Hardly the most general article, but it shoes how you can attract website traffic if you have useful how-to information. Of course this article is irrelevant now that the HTC Desire runs Android 2.2, which has tethering as a built-in function.
  2. Cheap fake tan and fat thighs? Snooki! This is embarrassing, really, but I get traffic to this post because Google Images lists it as one of the first few results for “snooki fat”.
  3. ICT Election Forum: what questions? This one puzzles me. The post just mentions that the pre-election forum was happening, and I asked people to suggest questions. Maybe they’re really looking for something else.
  4. Why I’ve deleted my Facebook account, which is self-explanatory.
  5. Homophobic beat-up by Sun-Herald’s Heath Aston, about a very grubby tabloid attempt to smear a politician.
  6. Senate to re-open Bloggers versus Journalists. When I write about journalism, it usually gets retweeted heavily through media circles. It certainly makes a difference to website traffic.
  7. Jetstar, Powderfinger to exploit fan’s enthusiasm, one of my rants against the evils of “crowdsourcing” that’s really just unpaid labour.
  8. Adam Schwab’s NBN reply, which is Mr Schwab’s response to my article Adam Schwab’s NBN “analysis” arsehattery.
  9. Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?. The main point is that you can’t just bolt some sort of “government 2.0 module” onto steam-era bureaucracies and magically bring them into the 21st Century.
  10. Selling the NBN: couldn’t you do better?. I have no idea why this, of all the things I’ve written about the National Broadband Network, was one of the most-read. It’s certainly not the best.

Just like last year, many older posts also continued to be popular. Indeed, as I worked down the website traffic report, I filled all ten slots in the non-2010 list while managing to find only two stories from the current year. Yet more proof that the more material you have on your website the more visits you’ll get. Don’t delete your old material, people!

However something that worries me is that so many of the items are listed not because people were reading the posts, but because other internet users had hot-linked to the images — that is, included them on another website — or robots attempting to post spam in the comments.

OK, the Top 10 posts of 2010 that weren’t written in 2010.

  1. 67 Australian SAS captured airbase defended by 1000 (March 2008). I think this one only makes the list because the photo keeps getting embedded in various military geek forums.
  2. Live Blog: Internet censorship forum, which is only in the list because for some reason or other it was hit heavily by the spambots. Who would read a live blog from a forum back in 2008?
  3. Julie, I want to make you a star (in a Samantha Fox kind of way) (September 2007) My ode to Julie Bishop, popular because of its photograph of Samantha Fox.
  4. Hello Kitty, you’re dead, and other surprise products (October 2007) People link to the (fake) photo of the Hello Kitty AK-47. Few seem to realise it’s a joke.
  5. Apple iPhone parodies (January 2007). Another embedded photo, I reckon. I must make sure my traffic reports filter out that stuff.
  6. Spaceport America, designed by Foster+Partners (October 2007). I’m puzzled why this one is on the list. Maybe people linking to the photos again?
  7. Live Blog: Politics & Technology Forum 2009 (February 2009). Another artefact of the spam robits, I think.
  8. The Madness of Corey Worthington Delaney (January 2008), proving once more that the lowest common denominator wins.
  9. My new hero: Hideki Moronuki (January 2008). Whenever the work of Sea Shepherd is in the news, people stumble across this post and discover that — shock horror! — I’m no a fan of that organisation.
  10. Oz soldiers design own recruitment ads (April 2007).

None of that surprises me. The most common searches which brought visitors to my website were “steve irwin jokes”, “stilgherrian”, “heath ledger jokes”, “julia gillard”, “hideki moronuki”, “snooki fat”, “sas”, “fisting”, “snooki is fat” and “hello kitty ak 47”.

You might also like to check out my own selection for what I think were the best posts from 2010, plus the lists for previous years:

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Homophobic beat-up by Sun-Herald’s Heath Aston

“EXCLUSIVE”, trumpets this morning’s story in Sydney’s Sun-Herald. “[NSW Liberal leader] Barry O’Farrell has his big fingers to blame for appearing to promote pornography.” Orly? “Appearing to promote pornography”? What bullshit, state political editor Heath Aston!

Here’s what seems to have happened.

On Twitter, O’Farrell apparently marked as a “favourite” a tweet by someone linking to a video of Matty Daley and Bobby Canciello (pictured), two American students who were attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss.

“Watch two boys break the record for longest kiss,” Aston reckons the video was entitled, though from the context it’s not clear whether that was the actual video title or just the text in the tweet.

That tweet was, we’re told, from someone who had previously linked to “images of male nudity and gay sex scenes”, either in tweets or in their Twitter profile. Again, we don’t know for sure because that Twitter account and O’Farrell’s favouriting have since been committed to the memory chute, and Aston hasn’t provided sources.

The user, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also posted a picture of a youth with his shirt off titled “an early teen boy completely and utterly adorable. That body is excellent.”

Aston claims O’Farrell is now “red-faced after saving a link on his Twitter account that leads to images of a shirtless under-age boy”.

Aston’s grubby little exercise in join-the-dots slander seems to work like this.

Continue reading “Homophobic beat-up by Sun-Herald’s Heath Aston”

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Anti-Emo riots break out across Mexico

Photograph of emo anti-violence protest in Mexico: María Meléndrez Parada

Attacks began on 7 March when, according to Wired, “several hundred people went on an emo-beating rampage in Querétaro, a town of 1.5 million about 160 miles north of Mexico City.”

The next week punks and rockabillys harassed emo kids in Mexico City, prompting police protection and a TV news story. Meanwhile the emos have organised anti-violence protests (pictured).

Hat-tip to Alex Willemyns for one of the oddest headlines — but this is for real.

The core issue is a clash between Mexico’s macho culture and emo‘s sexual ambiguity. Yep, it’s just good old-fashioned gay-bashing.

[O]nly in the past year have emos begun to make their presence felt in the streets. In response, many of the established so-called tribus urbanas like punks and metalheads are responding with violence…

[B]y some accounts, the emo subculture is identified with homosexuality in Mexico. As Mexico City youth worker Victor Mendoza told Time.com: “At the core of this is the homophobic issue. The other arguments are just window dressing for that.”

Perhaps not so old-fashioned: we can drag a web 2.0 angle into this…

Continue reading “Anti-Emo riots break out across Mexico”