Worth a laugh:
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.
The Australian licensed versions of the Gawker Media blogs, Defamer and Gizmodo have launched.
First thoughts: I’ll probably reserve judgment in full for now, to early to make a call on them properly, but naturally a couple of things:
1. They didn’t take lessons from Nick Denton when it comes to launching.
Defamer has 4 posts in total, 2 are welcome, send us tips posts, and the other two cover Big Brother and Mary. I’ve watched just about every single launch Nick Denton has done over the years, from rumour to actual launch, and he always stuffs his blogs with lots of reading goodies prior to launch, which obviously also makes sense: you want to capture first time readers when they visit by presenting them with a pile of interesting content that scopes across the broader range of interests: Defamer Australia looks and feels empty, because it is.
2. Where’s the Australian content on Gizmodo?
There’s a post on Gizmodo Australia that includes the words “we covered the xyz gadget last year”, which is interesting given the Australian version just launched. I’m not party to the syndication deal, but wouldn’t it make sense to at least try and localise some of the content, simple things like changing the words “we covered it last year” to something like “the US version of Gizmodo covered it last year here”, not only putting it in context, but also helping new readers? which of course begs the question: if most (all?) is just republished from the US site without change, why wouldn’t people just read Gizmodo.com as opposed to Gizmodo.com.au?
As I said, early days, I’ll give it a week then revist them after they’ve settled in, given it looks like they haven’t even gone close to settling in…I would have waited 2 more weeks then launched, once everyone was comfortable and the bugs in the writing styles had been sorted….but maybe that’s just me 🙂
According to the SMH, this is a picture of French Presidential Candidate Nicolas Sarkozy on the campaign trail. Gotta love the tractor:
From the SMH:
Tourism New Zealand has admitted it digitally enhanced the latest images of scenic New Zealand spots in its 100 per cent Pure New Zealand campaign.
No word yet if it was a matter of just cutting out the sheep 🙂
I always find it interesting when people say stuff they shouldn’t, then try to undo the damage by deleting the post, ignoring the fact that RSS leaves a trail. And no, for the record I generally don’t delete stuff, although I do often regret writing some of it, but hey, I’m also smart enough to know someone will notice me deleting a post I’ve just written.
Anyhow, looks like Mr Shoemoney himself had a change of heart, because this post got deleted:
All Ask does is install Spyware of people’s computers and is nothing more than a Made For Adsense site? Dems fight’n words 🙂
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 🙂
If you’re looking for a good Web 2.0 cause to support, visit Mashable and sign the petition against Amazon’s decision to sue Statsaholic (previously Alexaholic). Lets see: Amazon opens its data saying “use it, please”. Someone does, they get popular, Amazon steals the best bits for Alexa, then sues the people who did nothing more than take Amazon up on its initial offer. Short story: Amazon, you suck.
