I suppose calling Gawker Media’s gossip blogs low rent would be stating the obvious, but playing the race card on a mix up of images at Google Finance is lower still again with this article:
Google Finance doesn’t care about black people
I saw it in my tech.memeorandum subscription and automatically thought: huge race based scandal at Google, worth a look. It was just a wrong picture. Wow! huge story (not). But juice it up with a race card in a headline and that equals clicks.

Now I suppose in the past I’ve been “creative” with some headlines, but I’ve usually had something of substance to back it up. This is just plain dumb.

And while I’m at it, was is America’s obsession with race any way? I was chatting on Skype to Aaron Brezell the other day and he mentioned it was St Patricks Day. My response was “is it?”. He asked whether we celebrate it here or not. I guess some people do. It would be an excuse to drink Guiness after all. But the whole ethnic identy, African-American, Korean-American, Marsian-American….thing I just don’t get. I can remember watching an episode on OZ on SBS last year, and one of the prisoners was of some sort of Irish background, but he was probably like 5th or 10th generation American, and yet he paraded around his “Irishness”. The Irish terrorist comes to the jail and thinks he’s a complete joke. Now I’m not begrudging anyone celebrating there ancestory, but shouldn’t you guys all be just plain old “Americans” first?. Most Australian’s don’t think in this way, we are just plane old Australians. Personally it makes for a more cohesive society. Doesn’t matter if your background is Asian, African, English, what ever, we’re just happy to be Australian’s. Maybe the US would be a better place if you followed our lead 🙂

An Australian site, Smarthouse.com.au, has gotten the scoop:

Insiders at Taiwanese phone maker BenQ say that Apple procurement executives have been talking to various Taiwanese phone makers during the past few months in an effort to cut a manufacturing deal on an iPod Phone

I’m currently considering getting a new mobile phone, one with a camera and colour screen (yep, the old beast I’ve got is THAT old). Might have to hold off on that for a while. Although I’m not sure I’d want a white mobile phone though, my 3 week old iPod Nano is already looking grey instead of white….guess I should have bought the black one.

The Blog Herald points to a new service: Bloginfluence, that rates your influence in the Blogosphere. Lots of bugs though, all I get are API error messages for their Technorati and Bloglines counts. Or is it that I’m just no longer influential enough to count 🙂

I want this. I’m tempted to say I want the blonde as well but I’m married. An electrically heated undershirt. I ran out of money so I couldn’t afford heating for the new house, but this would be ideal for winter.

Update: this post broke IE, so I’m now inserting a whoe pile of p commands to make it work again. Damn IE. It just doesn’t conform with web standards!

Insert text here to make the site work in IE.

More text

I’m doing a bit of a Dave Winer and changing the site image. The new image is Declan and I at swimming lessons about 4 weeks ago. I’ve since got a new bleach so there is no dark roots, I’m totally blonde now 🙂

Update: I should find a way of rotating the image, maybe in the future 🙂

Shai has been to Tasmania. It’s one of the few places in Australia I’ve never been. You know, unlike the rest of the world, going “overseas” is a much bigger deal for Australians. Aside from the fact that it’s whole lot longer to get there, there is a different thought process here. Because we are so big, ok, maybe not as big as Canada, but big none the less, and, I suppose more importantly isolated from much of the rest of the world, travelling for us is a big deal, even if we are talking interstate. Remember it’s something like at 3 day car drive from Melbourne to Perth. And we can’t hop in a car and drive to another country. It’s physically impossible.

For example, it’s a 3 1/2 hour flight from Perth to Bali. It’s the same time to Melbourne. 4 1/2 hours to Sydney, 5 1/2 hours to Brisbane. 5 1/2 hours is the same time it takes to get from Singapore to Perth. It’s longer again if you want to fly routes such as Adeliade-Cairns, or Melbourne-Broome.

Australian’s like to travel, but we’ve got soooooo much to see in our own back yard. The whole new australia.com ads are quite amusing, aside from the sad cliched images. You can really experience a bit of everything in Australia. We are that big 🙂

So as they say: where the bloody hell are you 🙂

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.

Spotted these Adsense ads here.

Two interesting points: one is that SixApart is using Google Adwords to sign up bloggers. Maybe the affiliate program through CJ.com isn’t working perhaps? My advice to SixApart is CJ is a pain, you’d be better of using LinkShare, Shareasale, or even running it yourself, with payment made monthly via Paypal.

The other ad is more interesting though, given its directly attacking SixApart’s Live Journal. From the site:

LJ Abuse runs rampant across LiveJournal, suspending accounts at will with no oversight and no appeal. The abuse team tosses around legal terminology with no idea what it means, and users are informed of rules only after being suspended for breaking them. Argue back and they will go in to your locked entries looking for ammunition against you.

It’s time for a new LJ Abuse team, a new manager, and a clean slate.

No ads on the site either, this is a blogger with an axe to grind.

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.