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 🙂

Loren has the details on how you can submit stories to the newly launched MySpace News. Top story there currently has two votes, which begs the question: how long until someone starts gaming it? indeed, a couple of MySpace accounts would do it, and you can pick them up in bunches of 100-1000 cheaply at places like Digitalpoint 🙂

Some people are just gutless

admin —  April 19, 2007 — 15 Comments

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.

From The Canadian: Manipulative Extraterrestrials influenced Adolf Hitler, scholars suggest.

Damn those aliens 🙂

On Tangler

admin —  April 18, 2007 — 1 Comment

Meg has a great review on Tangler, Marty Well’s startup. I was part of the closed beta test since its original incarnation as a separate program, and its been remiss of me not to review it to date, I should have, we have far too few good things coming from Australia, and Marty is not only a good bloke (I’ve spent a little time with him last year), it’s also a clever idea. Tangler in now in open beta, check it out.

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

Apparently people are trying to profit off the Virginia Tech Massacre, with Wired reporting that domain names based on the massacre are up for sale on eBay. I’m all for people making money, and domaining is a legitimate business, but this is just sick. I wonder what they would think if one of the victims was their kid?

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 🙂

tvI’ve finally, finally got around to buying a replacement for my 8 year old, 68cm Teac old fashioned CRT TV, our first major purchase after I got married…we even used AGC finance to pay for it at the time 🙂

Picked up a Sony 101cm (40in) Bravia LCD True HD 1080i model: this one I think, the KDL40X2000. Has more inputs that I’ll probably ever have gadgets to plug in to.

Note the list price at Sony.com.au is $4599 (time of writing).

Tip: it pays to shop around. I paid $3700 for it, although it won’t be delivered till next week (stock coming from Perth). And yes, I didn’t buy it online, I bought it locally, in Bunbury, from a real person.

There are 3 major retailers in Bunbury that sell TV’s (outside Kmart/ BigW and Target and a couple of smaller Hi-Fi/ specialty shops). I went to all three pretty much knowing what I wanted, that I wanted “True HD” + LCD, because I believe that it will help future proof the purchase, being that it gives full resolution with Blueray and what not.

Harvey Norman was $4599
Good Guys: $4399
Retravision: $4299

I didn’t even bother trying with Harvey Norman, indeed I’m really surprised they’re still in business, they don’t stock anything that is price or cheap any more, presence is their only redeeming feature.

The local Goodguys discounts at around 8% for cash, which would have bought the TV to about $4050.

Knowing this, when told the price by Retravision, I said to the guy that they had it for the same price as The GoodGuys (they didn’t), and that they’d offered me a very generous discount for cash, without telling him the actual figure. He came back at $3700. Suffice to say SOLD.

Haggling isn’t my thing, but this was easy, I saved $900 over the Sony + Harvey Norman Price, and an amzing $600 off the actual ticket price at the store….that and you need to pay in physical cash is the other tip, when they see you’re serious with a ton of folding in your hand, it’s amazing the bargains you can get.

Last tip: Have a budget as well. I only ever had $4000 in cash with me, and that’s all I was willing to pay. As it turns out, I’ve still got $300 in my wallet 🙂

(note to US readers, prices in AUD, which given a week or two will probably be the same value as the US dollar anyway, currently trading at 83c)

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)