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  • Inquisitr comes in at 7th on Australian Startup Index

    TechNation Australia ?Ǭª Blog Archive ?Ǭª Australian Startup Index - Jan 09

    The definition is probably a little fluid, but we get included with sites that may be arguably less deserving. Very nice though. The full index here.

    BTW, anyone know what’s happening with the top 100 Australian blogs index? Meg hasn’t updated since November. I in part understand why: manually calculating the totals must be a complete bitch, but Meg has just completely stopped blogging as well.

    One commitment though: if she isn’t back soon, I’ll give it a shot. Probably need half a day to do it, but it’s an index I value.

  • Obama to the Right

    Via Larvatus Prodeo an interesting piece from The Monthly Review placing Obama to the right in a world sense with this nifty graph.

    skitched-20090112-100116.jpg

    Money quote:

    “In other words, Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.”

    More at the Monthly Review here.

  • King St. Newtown the Song

    Via FullTimeCasual, King St. Newtown the song. Besides what I think is an XC Falcon early in, not much has changed on the street. Well, the Hub closed down, long the Sydney Adult Theatre location of choice, and Coles New World doesn’t look that way anymore…but the rest looks very familiar. Still, I’ve only done that drive a handful of times in the last 12 years. My memories are still very much slanted from my childhood growing up in Sydney.

  • Inquisitr December 2008

    Pageviews: 1,962,105 (per Google Analytics)

    Traffic profile: highest post accounted for 13.5% of traffic.

    Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me). However unbeknown to us, the ad figures we were working with were make believe from one provider. We’re profitable, but not by as much as we’d believed. Further revenue decreased significantly this month per page view, so while we brought more in, it wasn’t relative to the increase in traffic. We are looking at ways of countering this in January. Whether this is representative of the market, our ad provider or a combination of both is to be seen.

    Technorati Rank:426

  • Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks

    Search for inquisitr.com

    The good news going into Christmas for me was strong traffic for The Inquisitr at a time I honestly worried that we might drop right off. Christmas Eve (US time, so my Christmas Day) delivered us our 4th best day for December, and our best day since December 11.

    We’ve never had any luck with Digg with the site. I’ve had some interesting conversations with people this year about other sites who rely on Digg; one person noted of another site when I noticed they’d be dropping traffic “they’re weening themselves off Digg.” I never say no to traffic, so it would be nice to have front pages on Digg, but we’ve grown without the support of Digg, except for Day 3 when we hit our only front page. Notably this isn’t the case with a number of other social voting sites who have been far more kind to us over the last nearly 8 months.

    After Christmas lunch I glanced briefly at our stats, and I started seeing traffic from Digg. Not huge amounts, but more than we’d usually ever get. My first reaction: OMG, a Christmas present from Digg.

    I looked for the post, and found it to be 4th in upcoming by number of Diggs. I couldn’t watch it closely, but the traffic kept coming in from it; in total we did just short of 700 page views from the mention. At about 6pm my time the post was the absolute top of upcoming by votes and sitting pretty for a front page. 11pm PDT Christmas Eve….so I’m thinking lovely, we might have a Digg spike dead on Christmas.

    Then it completely disappeared, despite only showing 16 hours old at the time from submission.

    It got buried.

    This despite posts with half the number of votes hitting the front page before it.

    I don’t know if the Digg algo unfairly marks us down, or what the story is, but what could have been, and perhaps should have been, wasn’t.

    Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks.

    There is a reason I spend most of my social voting time on Reddit. This just confirms it.

  • Bleak Shopping Christmas

    I’ve so far managed to avoid Christmas shopping, not helped by the fact that I can’t stand crowds….probably some sort of medical thing, but I feel claustrophobic in large crowds and ill to the point of near panic. Only at Christmas I might add, I wonder if there’s a phobia for that?

    But I digress: she who must be obeyed spent 4 hours shopping on Bridge Road Richmond yesterday, long famed as one of Melbourne’s cut price fashion strips, and usually busy at the best of times. Her exact words to me is that she couldn’t believe how quiet the shops were.

    She also said that she’d heard shop owners discussing how quiet Christmas trade was this year, and even customers saying they’d been to Chadstone (the largest shopping center in the Southern Hemisphere) and that they could easily find a park, which in good times is hard any day, let alone a week prior to Christmas.

    Our local shopping strip Camberwell has definitely been quieter for months, and while the number of people is up getting close to Christmas, it’s not the mad house you’d expect in a good year. I can drive the strip in under 10 minutes at lunchtime on a Saturday (so yesterday)….

    God knows then how the SMH is saying spending will be up $700m this Christmas. I’m going to head to Chaddy Monday morning for a quick shop, and will report back then, but it certainly smells like bad times to me.

  • How long now for the Australian Car Industry?

    Key Automotive Statistics 2007.pdf (page 15 of 29)

    The above chart comes from Key Automotive Statistics from the The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

    With GM likely to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy before Christmas with the bailout package failing to pass the US Senate, and Chrysler and Ford not far behind it, how long now for the Australian Car Industry?

    It’s getting so bad that even Toyota is starting to make cuts, be it primarily at the top, although reports from the States also indicate some production lines are stopping due to a backlog of inventory as well.

    No amount of money from Rudd is going to save the Australian car industry now.

    Ironically it may be our best export earner and best local innovator who may be the first to go. According to stats, the bulk of our export market is to the Middle East, with the bulk of those sales coming from Holden.

    Maybe they might hold on to Holden even in bankruptcy, but don’t count on it. The chart above shows 3 years of losses leading into this year; the product might be good, but a couple of billion in exports doesn’t counter growing loses that are bound to be far worse this year with Australia slowly sliding into a recession (and we’re only not in one due to farm output).

    Ford is the best placed of the US car makers going forward financially, but they still lag behind GM (Holden) locally, so the Ford plant will be at risk.

    Toyota is easiest to swap out, after all Toyota makes Camry’s the world over, and the Aurion is just a Camry with a V6 engine and some different body work, not exactly hard to replace with an overseas plant.

    My prediction: at least one manufacturer will quit Australia in the next 6 months, possibly sooner. If we have any car industry left by 2010, it will be either by miracle, or so much Government subsidy that each car could be given away for free.

  • Fence sitting on an Australian Bill of Rights

    So the Governments latest shiny media promotion tool is an Australian Bill of Rights, starting with a “nationwide consultation on human rights.”

    I’m not quite sure where I sit on it, at least until what’s going to be in it becomes clear. The Libs have come out hard against it naturally, and any over extension of the nanny state caused by a Bill of Rights is something that should concern most fair people.

    However I might be for it if it included one magic ingredient sorely missing from the Australian Constitution (and presuming a Bill of Rights would be enrished by Constitution amendment you’d presume it would have similar standing). Free Speech.

    Free speech that includes freedom of the press and freedom for any citizen to speak within reason.

    Sadly though it would appear at least now that an Australian Bill of Rights would result in a chilling effect on free speech, with targets including “promotion of religious tolerance and fundamental human rights” sounding an awful lot like you can’t speak out against a religion for example.

    Free speech IS a fundamental human right. The fact that the Government hasn’t mentioned it isn’t surprising given they’re trying to censor with internet and they arrest journalists for keeping sources secret. The nanny state has a fringe of big brother about it in 2008, lets hope that a Bill of Rights doesn’t make the situation worse.

  • More sloppy newspaper reporting on job ads

    You’d think it was the end of the world when you see things like this crap from The Oz

    “Ads in newspapers suffered the biggest two-month fall in the 30-year history of the ANZ job ads survey.”

    Of course the newspaper figures are always quoted first

    Jobs ads in newspapers fell by 12 per cent to 11,767, following October’s 12.1 per cent fall, and declined by a yearly pace of 42.7 per cent.

    And then the internet job stats follow

    Internet advertisements, meanwhile, dropped by 8.4 per cent in November, to a near two-year low of 199,433, following October’s 5.5 per cent drop, and falling by an annual pace of 16.6 per cent.

    Notice the meanwhile, because the internet job ads are an after thought.

    But look at the hard figures: 11,767 newspaper job ads vs 199,433 internet job ads.

    Memo to Australian journalists: no reasoned objective view of these figures could possibly maintain the primacy of newspaper job advertising rates in any report on job ads. Indeed, the newspaper job advertising marketplace in Australia is so low, there would be a reasoned argument that they shouldn’t be mentioned at all.

    You wouldn’t mention a drop in the sales of Alfa Romeos as being representative of the whole car sales market, so why in 2008 are Australian newspapers still doing the same with job ads.

    Fail with a dose of delusion on top.