Re: Green Left is top Australian political site

["Ozleft" <ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Gould responds to Peter Boyle

The old adage is "lies, damned lies and statistics", and it's worth keeping
that in mind when considering the statistical information Peter Boyle gives
us about websites.

I'm a bit new to the website game, but my friends involved in Ozleft have
been doing it a bit longer, and we've learned reasonably fast.

Even if you discount the self-promotion in Peter Boyle's and Dave Riley's
skiting, the fact that the GLW site is at the top of the chart kept by PC
Authority is a considerable political achievement for the DSP, and ought not
be discounted.

But it requires a bit further investigation and analysis. The first question
is whether this figure is just for the GLW site or for all of the DSP sites,
and is it just hits to the home page or to each individual item, which would
increase usage dramatically.

One thing that can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that many of
the hits are international, for the very obvious reason that the DSP has for
a number of years engaged in energetic networking with far left groups,
partly as a kind of Potemkin Village exercise to compensate for its lack of
political influence in Australia.

Nevertheless, from a socialist internationalist point of view this
networking is of considerable importance, and more power to the DSP in this
respect.

It seems very likely, if you take out the international component, the DSP
websites are probably sitting there alongside Workers Online, the ALP and
the Greens, in terms of hits, and even at that level that's quite an
achievement.

The other sites on the PA Authority list should give us pause in considering
these matters. Obviously things like Ausflag, and the Australian Politics
site, which few of us have ever heard of, are used extensively by high
school students in projects, etc, and it may well be that some of the GLW
hits are coming from that source too. Again, that's an achievement, because
leftist ideas can get into the schools from this source. So, again, more
power to the DSP's elbow.

Another aspect of this question is the decline of political newspapers.
Before the last five years it always used to amuse me in my shop when
members of the different socialist groups would flick through the political
newspapers and stand there for a considerable time reading the papers of
their rivals, but never buying them.

Despite the fact that my shop has always had a robust business in political
books because it has the largest range in the southern hemisphere, no one
ever seemed to buy the political newspapers, because obviously their
interest was satisfied by their own newspaper and they were reluctant to buy
rival newspapers.

For the last two or three years none of the socialist groups have bothered
to maintain the ineffectual ritual of bringing their newspaper into my shop
or Gleeboooks, the other main shop with a leftist clientele, which carries
alternative magazines. Obviously a point has been reached that it's not
worth the effort.

All the other groups except the DSP and the Socialist Alternative have in
practice given up any serious attempt to sell their newspapers or magazines,
even in the streets, and it is obviously becoming much harder to do so,
because of firstly, the web, and secondly the competition for international
coverage with journals such as the Guardian Weekly, of which I sell about 35
copies weekly in my shop.

Even my own behaviour has been affected by the web. I used to seek out the
hard copy of GLW, but now like many others since I hooked up to the web, I
look at it online and only buy it if it turns up at a public meeting.

I have a strong feeling that many politicised leftists behave like me once
they have access to the web, so it seems likely that many visitors to the
GLW site are opponents seeking information. Even here, however, it seems to
me that the GLW site's high hit rate is a considerable achievement for the
DSP. It keeps people interested, even DSP opponents.

It must be said, however, that high web usage doesn't automatically, in any
way translate into political influence. Look at the Ausflag site among the
top 10.

An interesting case study in this respect is the website of the former SLL,
now the Socialist Equality Party. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is a
widely read leftist site, because the SEP does what the DSP does: create a
lot of links, promote their site and adopt a more careful, moderate tone
than they have in the past.

They advance a political line that says all trade unions and socialist and
labour movement organisations are bankrupt and the only task is to build
their organisation. They say this elegantly and carefully in about 15
languages, and they have a widely read site, but there is absolutely no
evidence that they exercise any political influence anywhere, underlining
the point that it's important, while using websites effectively, not to
overestimate their political influence.

OUR EXPERIENCE WITH THE OZLEFT WEBSITE

A few people set up Ozleft about October last year, with the aim of
promoting discussion on the left, and we have put up a large number of
useful documents, some of my polemical writings and some links to other
political websites, with particular emphasis on material useful to socialist
and Marxist discussion and information.

On April 22 we put up a counter for hits on the homepage and by this morning
(May 29) it had recorded 2800 hits, which is quite respectable for a modest
venture like Ozleft.

A few days after the counter was set up we put up on Ozleft the DSP "loyal
opposition" resignation letters for the information of the left, and the hit
rate on the site soared for a couple of weeks.

A few days ago, we put up the ISO resignation letter, and again the hit rate
soared.

The interesting thing about this is that the links to the ISO letter, sent
to various email lists, was to the letter itself, not the homepage, so after
reading it some of the visitors must have gone to the homepage. We haven't
yet got a mechanism for counting hits to individual pages on the site.

We intend to continue developing the site as a serious source of socialist
information and documentation, and we'll see what happens.

We've also had some experience over the past six month of participating in
discussion on Marxmail and the GLW list, and it seems that getting a real
discussion going on such sites has problems of its own, which the
moderators, respectively Louis Proyect and Margaret Alam, are no doubt well
aware of, and we don't have any insights into how to overcome these problems
except to take some care with material we produce and introduce to the
discussion.