Author: admin

I’ve had about 10 people say this to me in the last week. Simple answer is no. For starters I’m actually having fun writing here. Real fun, like I use to have once upon at time with The Blog Herald itself. Towards the end it became too big for me to manage. At times writing to it was like a chore, and there was the reader expectation that I would post. It became work, and although I’d never change the 3 years I had writing it, it was consuming too much time. The money from the sale of course helped. I’ve got a painter in the new house at the moment for example that I couldn’t have afforded if I hadn’t sold the site. I even went and bought a new fridge. The first time I’ve owned a “new” fridge…ever. And it’s also given me a window of opportunity to work from home towards building b5media into something even bigger than the monster it has already become (I’m not sure I can disclose some of our latest figures, but they are amazing!).

And of course the tone is different. A lot of what I wrote at The Blog Herald was in a “reporting” format, duncanriley.com is a lot more informal, and it’s not on a particular topic either. Sure, I occasionally went off topic at The Blog Herald, but here I can really pretty much do and write what ever I want, as long as I don’t upset Jeremy (or 9rules, which upsets Jeremy in turn 🙂 ) I can ramble to my hearts content, pretty much as I am now with this post, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s sort of liberating in a way. And if tomorrow I wake up and don’t feel like posting, no ones going to ask where I am. If the traffic drops I couldn’t care less. And of course because there is no longer this obligation, this concern, this stress, I’m actually writing a fair bit here at the moment. I can only hope the fun lasts.

There’s something deeply disturbing in seeing a blogger in this position. I suppose it harks back to the journalism side of things when we see a reporter becoming the reported. And yet Mario (Perez Hilton) seems to have done just that, and continues to make friends with the A-Listers he writes about.

A note for the discerning though. The blogosphere, and in particular the A Listers remain insular and these celebrity types never seem to get a serious look in. The MSM are falling for the same trap as well, because you always see your serious tech types quoted on blogging (Doc Searls, Steve Gilmour come to mind). And yet bloggers like Mario and Trent from Pink in the New Blog are bypassing the more traditional ways of blog promotion that many of us know and a getting their messages through directly to their target audience. Through magazines, through chat boards, that sort of thing. Celebrity blogging is already at the point where its bigger than political blogging. Don’t believe me? check out the blogs available to advertise on at BlogAds. Look at some of the traffic. I once wrote about the demise of the geek bloggers, well the political bloggers are next on the list, because mass audiences like this sort of stuff, and as blogging becomes more and more a part of the mainstream, the tastes of its readers are reflected in the sites they read, and whether we like it or not, celebrity gawking is fodder for the mass market of worker bees seeking an escape from the drudgery of their 9 to 5 jobs.

And I thought the Federal Liberal Government was bad on the censorship front:

The Federal Opposition has outlined a plan to block Internet pornography reaching home computers.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley says a Labor government would introduce laws requiring Internet service providers to offer a “clean feed” without pornographic and violent sites.

Mr Beazley says Australian parents do not want their children to be exposed to such material.

“Block it at the point of the provider as opposed to the point of the parent and if that particular household wants to opt into the pornographic sites then they make an active decision to do so,” he said.

“Parents want their kids learning on the net, not exposed to pornography and violence.

“The reality is … only about a third of the parents put some sort of blocker in relation to the sites on their home computers, it’s too hard for most of them but if you did it at the level of the provider, probably very few people would opt in.”

Oh yeah, and completely f*ck Australian internet busniesses while you’re at it Kim, because we already have some of the highest internet charges in the world, and impossing this sort of restriction on ISP’s will only see the cost get higher. Even the Howard Government knew it was technically near on impossible and cost prohibitive to impose this sort of censorship.

I’ll leave it to Phil:

On the weekend, I posted a little tiny post about the new theme I just adopted. I was absolutely blown away when I logged in on Sunday to find that it was about #6 in the top WordPress.com posts at that time.

I sat there scratching my head trying to work out why? It didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t have a sensationalized headline. It didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t have any insightful commentary. It didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t get linked by anyone. Then as I read the comments it struck me that the only thing it did do was convert my RSS audience into web traffic. As it was about something that you had to actually see on the site, rather than just being able to glean from your RSS reader, a whole bunch of people actually bothered to click on the link to visit the actual blog, rather than the virtual version.

Since I went through blog burn-out a little while ago, I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve taken the advice of people like Matthew Ingram and Paul Montgomery and I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve been paying far less attention to traffic. If I needed a reminder that blog traffic is relatively meaningless than this was it. Fact is, as much as Feedburner and so forth can tell you how many RSS subscribers you?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve got, the reality is if you?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve got full feeds you?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢re never going to know how many people read each post.

It also made me realise just how much traffic RSS feeds steal from websites!

Now, I don?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t care. I blog because I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m trying to get my ideas out there so its of little concern to me if people read in RSS or on the blog (my dislike of RSS for that reason is purely philosophical not functional). But try telling a publisher that they can publish full feeds and not only cannibalise their web traffic but also lose control of knowing which of their readers are reading what.

They?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢re just gonna love that.

Latest Spaces figure from the NY Times: 40 million users. That’s 40 million blogs folks, because MSN Spaces is a blogging platform. Shame on those who still quote Technorati as tracking the entire blogosphere. Try 200 million blogs. At least.

Dave Winer points to the effort to save the Mecury News. My problem. I went to the site that aims to save it as part of the employee buyout. No way to invest. The Mercury News is a daily read for me, be it via Google. These guys write good stuff. And yet they’ve got the potential of getting thousands of ppl to invest in the idea, and they aren’t facilitating it. Take notes from Firefox. They got thousands to invest in the NY Times ad at $20 a pop. I was one of them. It was easy to do. If they make it easy ppl will come. I’ll quite happily put a little money towards a share in the Mecury News, as I know others will. But if its too hard, it will be lost for ever.

Shaun Carney, pay attention!: Yaro Starak vs Tim Blair. It’s not even Darren you need to consider.

Maybe I’m just tired, but we’ve just gone through an outage at b5media, our first big outage with our current webhosts, and it was within a week of duncanriley.com joining the server. It seems every time this site joins a server I kill the web host. I’ve nearly lost count at how many web hosts I’ve gone through now 🙂 (insert mysterious music here).