Talking About the Blog II

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Last month I gave a talk about the blog at Swin­burne Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, at the invi­ta­tion of one of the blog’s most active mem­bers, Dr Matt Mitchell. Swin­burne’s video of the talk is below, and it neat­ly melds my talk and the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave:

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

The vol­ume will appear too low when you hear Mat­t’s intro­duc­tion, but this is because the audio lev­el was set on my radio mic, which is much loud­er than the the­atre micro­phone. Turn the sound up to hear Mat­t’s open­ing, but be ready to turn it down when I start talk­ing.

I made an audio record­ing of the talk and the dis­cus­sion as well. The audio qual­i­ty in the video record­ing is quite good, but the audio record­ing is bet­ter for the discussion–at least when it comes to hear­ing what the ques­tions and com­ments by audi­ence mem­bers were.

Steve Keen’s Debt­watch Pod­cast

Mat­t’s doc­tor­ate is in edu­ca­tion, and he was fas­ci­nat­ed by Debt­watch as an exam­ple of the way in which the inter­net, and blog­ging in par­tic­u­lar, has trans­formed peo­ple’s capac­i­ty to learn. I have also found it a fas­ci­nat­ing expe­ri­ence, giv­en that I start­ed it sim­ply as an eas­i­er way of dis­trib­ut­ing my month­ly Debt­watch Reports. I had no expec­ta­tion of it becom­ing as big as it is now, with almost 4,000 reg­is­tered users, over 7,000 unique read­ers per day, and a stim­u­lat­ing and extreme­ly civ­il dis­cus­sion between about 100 active par­tic­i­pants.

Giv­en the last point in par­tic­u­lar, it’s been a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me as well: many of the ideas that have been dis­cussed on the blog will find their way into the book I am slow­ly writ­ing on finan­cial insta­bil­i­ty.

I also gave a quite detailed pre­sen­ta­tion on my analy­sis of the finan­cial cri­sis, which I’ll post when I have time next week.

The Debtwatch Association Meeting

We now have about a dozen tak­ers for this meet­ing, but the more that can make it the bet­ter. So if you are able to join us for din­ner at 7pm next Tues­day (March 9) in Syd­ney, please drop me an email using debunk­ing at gmail dot com.