Thought I might open this one up, given I’m not getting responses to my emails, and I’m hearing all sorts of interesting rumours: where is David Krug? he’s literally MIA? anyone have any ideas? health or something else?

Something a little more upbeat this year, some Banjo Patterson: We’re All Australians Now;

Australia takes her pen in hand,
To write a line to you,
To let you fellows understand,
How proud we are of you.

From shearing shed and cattle run,
From Broome to Hobsons Bay,
Each native-born Australian son,
Stands straighter up today.

The man who used to “hump his drum”,
On far-out Queensland runs,
Is fighting side by side with some
Tasmanian farmer’s sons.

The fisher-boys dropped sail and oar
To grimly stand the test,
Along that storm-swept Turkish shore,
With miners from the west.

The old state jealousies of yore
Are dead as Pharaoh’s sow,
We’re not State children any more
We’re all Australians now!

Our six-starred flag that used to fly,
Half-shyly to the breeze,
Unknown where older nations ply
Their trade on foreign seas,

Flies out to meet the morning blue
With Vict’ry at the prow;
For that’s the flag the Sydney flew,
The wide seas know it now!

The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel,
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.

The honoured graves beneath the crest
Of Gaba Tepe hill,
May hold our bravest and our best,
But we have brave men still.

With all our petty quarrels done,
Dissensions overthrown,
We have, through what you boys have done,
A history of our own.

Our old world diff’rences are dead,
Like weeds beneath the plough,
For English, Scotch, and Irish-bred,
They’re all Australians now!

So now we’ll toast the Third Brigade,
That led Australia’s van,
For never shall their glory fade
In minds Australian.

Fight on, fight on, unflinchingly,
Till right and justice reign.
Fight on, fight on, till Victory
Shall send you home again.

And with Australia’s flag shall fly
A spray of wattle bough,
To symbolise our unity,
We’re all Australians now.

Just watching Big Brother now (Monday night: WIN WA is actually showing it this year, so I don’t have to pray for TEN coverage from Perth). Gretel Killeen has at least 3 times referred to the entry of the housemates as being “last night” or “24 hours later” in referral to the 2 about to go in, despite the fact that news reports clearly state that the show was recorded Saturday night, not Sunday night which is when it screened…short version, house mates have been in the house 48 hours. So spot question: do the producers just take viewers for being dumb? even though the target demographic is the MOST switched on and online, and would know the difference? I suppose ironically that some will saw that people who watch such fodder are dumb themselves, which makes me guilty (I watch little TV, but last year, after a 3 year break I was hooked, when you don’t get network TV for that long, you get hooked). Food for thought.

Meg asks a question right out of my own past: how many Australian Blogs are there?.

I’m going to guess. If we include MySpace blogs as blogs (which we should BTW), I’m going to guess 3-4 million, maybe more. Without MySpace, 1 million.

It might be time to do some digging, or even a fully blown Blog count, given it’s over a year since I tried the exercise at The Blog Herald…mind you, they use to take me a full day, I’d think it’s a week if I tried to do it now, maybe more if I attempted to authenticate geographical data from the big providers. Of course, if I could get that data, I could get an Australian figure as well.

OK, so this isn’t usually the forum for sexist comments on the female form, but Channel Seven’s Naomi Robson has never struck me as being overly attractive before, and yet this picture, from news.com.au…well, it puts a different spin on it. In old world parlance, she’s a pretty good looking sort. Now note to female readers, I’ll ogle a male next just for good balance 🙂

WARNING: SEVERE LANGUAGE AHEAD. If you don’t like this sort of language, well… you know what 🙂

Catallaxy, a blog I’ve never heard of before, but apparently ranks in the 30000’s at Technorati (yes folks, spam blogs rate higher there), partakes in some good ol’ fashioned tall poppy bashing, following on from Meg’s great Australian Top 100 blogs list, this time saying that Tim Blair should be Australia’s top blogger over the other chap who is, on the basis that Blair has 4000 more page views a day. That, and that they should be higher up the list as well.

Is it just me, or is something a little small, perhaps in their pants?

Give me a break. Not taking away from Tim Blair here, he has a strong following in the political blogosphere, particularly in Australia, but page views mean diddly squat in the age of RSS feeds and influence. The other blog has in excess of 22,000 subscribed readers alone, and I know that as a subscriber (still, personal issues aside it’s still occasionally a good read…god that hurts 🙂 ) I very rarely ever visit the site, if at all, and yet I READ IT EVERY DAY. It’s the conundrum of providing a full feed, your readers may never visit the site so your page stats NEVER reflect your influence or readership…indeed no where close.

But I think, being Friday, that we should start a new list, the

OMG I have a small penis, pack of jealous, petty Australian c*nts list.

1. Catallaxy.

I’m sure the folks who write this unknown blog, who probably just got the biggest link here they’ve ever got, will sleep better tonight knowing that they’ve topped a list. The rest of us, who are too busy getting on with things, who care more about our readers instead of lists, will continue to do what we always do, write for an international audience who use Alexa and like to link to us 🙂

This isn’t something I’m particularly fond of writing, but it’s just so wrong it cant be left unsaid.

The Age covers the Top 100 Australian blogs, and finishes with this:

One blogger, who did not want to be named, told The Age that the top blog, Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger site, was outperformed by a lot of other top Australian blogs in terms of visitor numbers. He said Ms Tsiamis’ methodology would skew the results towards “extremely geeky” blogs, or blogs with an unusually strong overseas readership.

Bloggers who say things like this anonymously are gutless little shits who shouldn’t be blogging to start with, are needlessly jealous and probably are suffering from relevance and page view depravation syndrome as well…that and it’s complete bullocks. I’ve seen the raw figures for that blog in the past, and whilst I can’t report on what it is today, that blog pumps through some seriously big numbers. Is it possible that other Australian blogs have audiences close to it? yes, outperformed? not impossible, but unlikely in all but a handful of sites, and even then not by a far margin (if at all). The proof as always is in the numbers, not only the ones used in this Top 100 list, but also the raw data, of which this gutless little wonder doesn’t have access.

The problem of course with any list is that people miss out, it pitches people against people where competition isn’t either necessary, healthy or required.

BTW the quote: “extremely geeky blogs, or blogs with an unusually strong overseas readership”? WTF? if anything geeky tech blogs are GROSSLEY under-represented on that list, a similar list for most other countries would be dominated by tech, this list isn’t. And “an unusually strong overseas readership” PLEASE EXPLAIN?!?! Xenophobia perhaps, what, overseas people reading Australian blogs is as welcome as the Black Panthers at a One Nation meeting? Petty, stupid stuff. By all means, take this particular blog down a peg, but do it based on facts and reasonable argument, not pure stupidity.

Foreign Policy has the headline: What do the Virginia Tech slayings say about South Koreans?

I’ll tell you what it says: don’t write stupid blog posts.

What a stupid headline. FP might conclude that there isn’t a question in relation to South Korean students, but the whole question shouldn’t have been put in the first place, and certainly the arguments that there’s something wrong with South Koreans shouldn’t have seen the light of day, full stop.

For starters, the chap is suppose to have been in the US for over 12-13 years, since he was a child. Secondly, just because there was a massacre in 82 in South Korea doesn’t mark an entire nation of people as nuts.

If you want to draw any sort of thing from this whole thing, its that US gun laws are stupid, that the proliferation of gun ownership in the United States makes these sorts of things more likely to happen in. That’s the logical conclusion.

I’ll reprint Crikey’s subscriber email from yesterday, judge as you may, I’m right of centre politically, maybe more libertarian than conservative, but when it comes to guns I don’t like them, and I don’t believe every man and his dog should have one:

Virginia state gun laws. Frequently asked questions:

Is a permit required to purchase rifles, handguns and shotguns? No.

Is registration required for rifles, handguns and shotguns? No.

Is licensing required for the owners of rifles, handguns and shotguns? No.

Do you need a permit to carry rifles and shotguns? No.

Is a permit required to carry a handgun? A permit is required only if the weapon is concealed.

Is there a one-handgun-per-month limit on gun sales? Yes

Are there limitations on assault weapons and magazines? No

May police limit the carrying of concealed handguns? No

Must child-safe locking devices be sold with guns? No

Are background checks required at gun shows? No

Are minors restricted from possessing guns? In part

Is a licence/permit required to buy handguns? No

Are all guns registered with law enforcement? No

Is safety training required for handgun buyers? No

Is it illegal for holders of concealed-weapon permits to carry guns into schools? Yes

I like this guys logic:

“Beer is the basis of modern static civ?Ǭ?ilization,” began Bamforth, Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science at the University of California, Davis. “Because before beer was discovered, people used to wander around and follow goats from place to place. And then they realized that this grain [barley] could be grown and sprouted and made into a bread and crumbled and converted into a liquid which gave a nice, warm, cozy feeling. So gone were the days that they followed goats around. They stayed put while the grain grew and while the beer was brewed. And they made villages out of their tents. And those villages became towns, and those towns became cities. And so here we are in New York, thanks to beer.”

It’s published in the Scientific American, so it must be true 🙂

It’s days like this I miss owning The Blog Herald…if only so I could be higher up the list 🙂

Dipping into the Blogpond has put together a new list of Australia’ Top 100 blogs, and I’ve made in at #8, all for a site which I don’t even really try on, seriously needs some template fixing (anyone for black links!) and probably could do with a little bit of promotion. Maybe next week 🙂

I’m going to have a Dave Winer moment here and ask the question: is there any way to pull this data into say an OPML file of feedurl’s or similar so I can subscribe to all of them at once?

(in part via Trevor Cook)