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.
Blog
-
How Many Australian Blogs are there?
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.
-
Defamer/ Gizmodo Australia launch
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 🙂
-
Getting back to basics, French style
According to the SMH, this is a picture of French Presidential Candidate Nicolas Sarkozy on the campaign trail. Gotta love the tractor:
-
New Zealand: beautiful one day, photoshopped the next
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 🙂
-
Jeremy Schoemaker slams Ask, then deletes post
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 🙂
-
Is Naomi Robson hot?
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 🙂 -
Join the Statsaholic petition
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.
-
How long to someone games MySpace News
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
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.