Sunday 31 March 2013

Daily Blog makes impressive debut

New left-wing blog, The Daily Blog, has proved extremely popular in its first month, debuting at number five in the New Zealand blog rankings.
The brainchild of Martyn Bradbury, the blog provides opinion pieces and commentary from prominent New Zealand left-wing bloggers, politicians, unionists and activists.  
Garnering 196,886 page views in its first month, Bradbury said the number of hits had exceeded his "wildest ambition”.
He had originally hoped to debut with 100,000 page views for March.
Bradbury said the purpose of the blog was to provide an alternative to Whale Oil and Kiwiblog, which he described as “far right online nonsense”.
Whale Oil remains New Zealand’s most popular blog by a wide margin, with 1,149,247 page hits last month, while Kiwiblog sits in second place.
Pete from Whale Oil said the team was happy with the number of hits, but they were always looking to increase their readership base.
Whale Oil founder Cameron Slater was initially dismissive of The Daily Blog ahead of its launch.

"This will go one of two ways: either I won't be able to stop going there for my daily laugh, or (much more likely), I'll pop in when [Bradbury's] made such a fool of himself that the news of it drfts into the attention span of the general media."

Scribe causes upset with Ryder Tweets

Christchurch rapper Scribe has angered bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum with his comments regarding bashed cricketer Jesse Ryder.

The Not Many hit-maker posted a Tweet saying "I'd like to know what Jesse Ryder did or said. Cantabrians don't beat people up for no reason."

He later added: "I'm not making excuses, I genuinely would like to know what started the whole thing. No-one gets beaten up for nothing.

Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater labelled the rapper an "irrelevant drop-kick" and a "cock".

Blogger Steve Gray accused Scribe of being a hypocrite, saying the rapper had once stood by while a man was viciously assaulted in an unprovoked attack.

Gray said Scribe "stood around" while his "posse... literally beat the face in of my friend..."   

Commenters on the Blog on the Tracks Facebook page were also highly critical of the rapper.

Two men have been arrested in relation to the assault and will appear in court on this week.