Blog

For at least the last 3 hours:

Nik Cubrilovic has the details @ TechCrunch: short version, despite its obsession with being non-commercial, and more recently punishing good webmasters everywhere by putting nofollow tags on the end of outgoing links, it looks like Jimbo Wales isn’t nofollowing links to his for profit Wikia sites.

I’m not sure what the total wash up is in relation to the nofollow tags, but I’ve seen a lot of big sites (and small ones, including duncanriley.com) lose pagerank in the PR update currently underway; but seriously, how is it that Wikipedia continues to be held on a dais as the pinnacle of all things good with Web 2.0 and citizen generated media when we all know that it’s nothing more than a conduit for Jimbo Wales’ commercial ambitions with Wikia? If it smells funny and links funny, then it’s usually a sign that it’s not the clean not for profit deity of Web 2.0 that everyone thinks it is.

Spot Question: how long till Wikipedia and Wikia start doing porn scantily clad pics?

Tris Hussey on some folk waking up today and discovering what I’ve been saying for 6-9 months: we’ve reached a peak in blog growth, at least in the Western World, although oddly enough they’re calling it a plateau.

Yawn.

Technorati now reckons there is only 15.5 million active blogs.

BS.

Double BS even.

Technorati has NEVER tracked all blogs and they never will. They hardly even touch the surface on MySpace, they are woefully under represented in Asia with the exception of Japan, and even figures I was doing 2 years ago, using figures in some cases DIRECTLY from blog hosts showed that there was a whole pile of blogs out there that ain’t in Technorati.

But back to the meme at hand: that there’s some sort of plateau. Yawn again. It’s talk about something that doesn’t exist because the number is BS, that and do they really think that active blogs will continue at the same rate (or even know what a plateau is?): is it therefore is talk about nothing, and if you talk about nothing, doesn’t that talk become nothing itself?

Dave Winer gets its right: “Look for individuals who are changing things using blogs, that’s what’s important.” Mind you, counting them was worthwhile once upon a time, back when we will still trying to prove the worth of blogs and blogging, but we’ve passed that point.

Via Ben Barren, Twitter is no longer supporting SMS in Australia. They’ve since updated the original post to say:

“To clarify, we’re getting a new access number for Australia?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùas soon as we get the number, sms service will be back in action. We’re working on it right now and it’s a high priority.”

But 99 million dollar question: why cut the service off before putting in place the alternative?

For the record I don’t use Twitter on my mobile, when I was the damn thing never stopped beeping, but I know a lot of people who were using it on their phones, a lot of people who little doubt will be pretty pissed about this.

A quick update on the original list which can still be downloaded by clicking here.

Meg has run an update to the list + I’ve now got a feed for MadBull’s Annoyances.

New blogs include:

http://infosthetics.com/
http://www.skeptics.com.au/
http://andrewlanderyou.blogspot.com/
http://www.business2.com.au/
http://www.thinkprospect.com.au/blog/
http://nickcowie.com
http://www.cantcoachthat.com/
http://the-riotact.com
http://altnews.com.au/drop/

I’ve updated the original list to include all these blogs, so it’s now longer than the Top 100, two reasons: I can’t be asked finding out which ones dropped off the list, secondly I don’t really want to knock anyone off it anyway, why start excluding people when this exercise is all about promoting Australian blogs.

Thanks to Meg for the update.

If you have previously run the original list in your feedreader, click here to get just the updated sites. Some feedreaders won’t install duplicates, but some do (Google Reader in particular), so best to be on the safe side.