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Archive
Posts from 2004 to 2017. This was a personal blog during a fairly chaotic decade in independent publishing — some of it tech commentary, some of it Australia, some of it ephemera. It’s kept here in full for anyone who arrives via an old link.
Current writing lives at SiliconANGLE.
5000
The comment count is a little strange. Disqus 17,300 odd, and I don’t think there was 7000 in the time before Disqus and after. The 5000 came Friday US time (March 20). So 5,000 posts in 319 days at an average of 15.7 posts a day.
Sydney Airport, where fruit is banned, but being beaten to death is OK
SMH: Bikie killed in Sydney Airport brawl The man was beaten to death INSIDE the Qantas Domestic Terminal. Where in the world was security? I know, it was too busy looking for forbidden fruit (like Apples from Victoria) in the baggage collection area, or making sure the pram going through X-ray wasn’t carrying a bomb. […]
ACMA Prohibited Links: where does the liability fall?
Is it illegal for Australians to link to the alleged ACMA blacklist on Wikileaks? Here’s ACMA quoted at news.com.au ACMA threatens fines of up to $11,000 a day for linking to sites on its secret censorship blacklist I’m not a lawyer, so I could be wrong, but is it actually illegal for individuals to link […]
Some days I wish there was a way we could do more Australian news
We get a really good run on GNews with Australian stories, but I don’t know how to monetize Australian news, well to the point where we can afford a sales team to make it worth while. The bad side is that while we get good treatment on Australian stories, GNews labels The Inquisitr as “The […]
Telstra channels Yes Minister
Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud: Last night I said that Telstra hadn’t shut down Leslie’s Twitter account. This was based on the advice of my colleagues. It’s factually correct, though it’s also true that Leslie’s senior managers independently told him last night to stop. So it’s factually correct that Telstra did not ask that […]
Freeview spoof response
Margaret Simons wrote about the now infamous Freeview spoof in Crikey Tuesday. She left something out. This was my response to Crikey, although it wasn’t published. Margaret Simons’ otherwise excellent coverage of the Freeview spoof video saga was somewhat sullied by a last line that reads “At the time of publishing, you can view the […]
The numbers recession we’re not having
Just a short(ish) note to anyone who is following our numbers at the moment. Over the weekend (Friday US time to be precise) I upgraded to WP 2.7.1 and we started having problems with our stats. At first, I thought that OMG our unique visitor count was crashing. Indeed, if you look at the data, […]
Job ad reporting: you’re doing it right
Latest job figures out today show more bad news for the Australian economy. Notable though was how they were reported. News.com.au grouped newspaper ads (5-6% of the total) with online, and didn’t offer split figures: The ANZ survey found total job advertisements slipped 10.4 per cent in February, the largest recorded monthly fall since the […]
Pacific Brands lynching
As is not unusual when backed by a media that likes nothing more than pitting company owners against a presumed proletariat, the Pacific Brands lynching continues. For those outside of Australia, Pacific Brands announced recently it was shutting down its Australian manufacturing plants. The company owns brands such as Bonds, Hard-Yakka and more. It was […]
Inquisitr February 2009: and still the ad market bleeds
Pageviews: 2,315,920 (new monthly record) Traffic profile: largest post at 15.2% of views (and a bloody lot of comments). Finances: the ad market is still bleeding. Our overall monthly return was down 2.1% from January despite a 27% jump in traffic. By my calculations, we are off 23% on what we should have achieved in […]
Shame Darwin Shame
I’m sympathetic to old diggers still holding a grudge against the Japanese given the historical context, but in 2009 there’s no place for this, particularly when a lot of the message is coming from people born well and truly after WW2 who simply don’t have an excuse to hold a grudge. Age: Japanese ship unsettles […]
Sure sign of a bad economy
Always a sure sign of a bad economy: cheaper cuts of meat, and booming chicken sales SMH: THE bleak economic climate is forcing shoppers at Coles to trade down from T-bones to sausages, in an attempt to cut their shopping bills. In the latest sign of the drift to thrift, consumers are also swapping expensive […]
Google News censoring pics?
We ran a story earlier today on the name and public details of the alleged Churchill fire arsonist. We didn’t run his picture due to the gag order in place on his picture and address in Victoria (the gag order was lifted on his name), despite The Inquisitr being hosted in the US. No idea […]
Some Australian PR Reps don’t get blogs
To start on a positive note, I’ve had a uptick lately of Australian PR pitches. Some are half reasonable, although like all the stuff that comes in, we can’t run it all, even if we wanted to. The Inquisitr doesn’t do a huge amount of Australian related content, although as our Australian traffic increases it […]
Age shall not weary them, nor the Google News forget
Just for a change, I’ll bag someone other than the mainstream media. Google News. Its Valentines Day, Feb 14. 11:15am in the morning at I’m typing this. And what is Google News showing in its latest Victoria news section? (hint, look at the dates of the stories)
Fail to Win
Jeremy Schoemaker makes a lot of sense Money quote: I am always amazed at how scared people are to fail. I fail all the time?¢‚Ǩ¬¶. or at least what other people would consider to be failures. I would rather call them experiences. Learning from your failures and trying until you find success is an amazing […]
Sitepoint deal.
Absolute steal.
Online ad spending up in Australia?
Paidcontent reports on a PCW report that suggests at least until the end of the last year, online ad spend in Australia continued to head north. Notably off a crappy base, and they only polled the “top 1000 sites” what ever that means. Still, wins a win.
People don’t like Karma
Received an odd email yesterday from someone I hadn’t heard from in years. Someone who out of the blue cut me off despite a once close working relationship. Turns out that she got a serious dose of karma, and is rather bitter about it. Wrote to me to say as much as well. Very strange […]
From the depths of despair rises the true Australian spirit
I’m still just….fuck. Victoria is like a morgue today. People are quiet, the look of horror on their faces, even if they weren’t directly affected. This isn’t to say that they are some how worse off than those who were directly affected; they simply aren’t. But this State is in a state of shock, that […]