Category: Web 2.0

Just a quick shout out to Pete Cashmore with thanks for giving me the opportunity to guest post on occasion on Mashable. My first post is up today, covering Melbourne based Copper Project from Element Software.

If you like, think of this as my community service (I’m not being paid). I’m passionate about Australian startups and although I’m always happy to write about them on The Inquisitr, there are standouts that deserve a bigger audience than I can deliver. Until recently that audience was on another site, but now it’s Mashable, as long as Pete and Adam are happy to have me. I’d note that this doesn’t mean I can write about every Australian startup that comes across my desk (I can’t), but if you’re an Australian startup who has interesting news, or even a story to tell, ping me and I can certainly consider it, for either The Inquisitr or Mashable.

JustAddMe offers a simple sidebar widget with links to social networks. My only gripe is that the list is a little limited, but please feel free to add me as above. Also FriendFeed here

If anyone knows of a deeper alternative leave a comment. I’m lazy so I like the idea 🙂

More here. Some really nice words from Michael.

The thing that’s surprised me about this is it didn’t leak in a month. Probably helps that I didn’t tell all but a few people, but it’s cool knowing that in the age of uber-gossip it never leaked.

The video below covers more (serious NSFW language warning…I no longer have to watch my f*cks quite so much). The key points: 1. I want my weekends back (although it wont happen for sometime, but at least I have control over that aspect 2. I’m a little tired (the whole Louis Gray thing being case in point) 3. I feel that if I’m going to kill myself doing this (blogging) it should be building something I own or have a stake in.

The other news is that I’ve soft launched the new site The Inquisitr. More details here. It still needs some tweaking and I wont be going hell for leather posting until the morning (still clearing up some TC stuff…and I need some beer 🙂 ). It goes without saying that I’m excited about it, and I believe the mix of tech, pop and funny stuff is pretty unique. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll have more to say on that in the coming weeks.

My thanks to all those people who sent well wishes across when the news broke. I’m stoked and humbled by the response.

I’ve never once tried to interfere with my old site, The Blog Herald. I sold it and that was the end of the matter. It did well under Matt Craven and the folks who bought it from me, but a year later Splashpress bought it and turned it into a poor mans Problogger with little or no news and I completely stopped reading it. The site always did advice, even before Problogger, but it was an occasional special that complemented the core news function of the site, it was never meant to be the main source of content. The original motto (since dropped) was more blog news more often, and I always prided myself on being the first with news from the then new blogging world.

Fast forward to this year and some sanity has prevailed. I believe Thord Daniel Hedengren is editing the site now and I’ve always thought highly of him, and he’s bought back Matt Craven and David Krug. Suddenly The Blog Herald has become a decent read again (news wise…I still don’t like the self help stuff, but it’s not dominating anymore) and I re-subscribed to the RSS feed.

Then someone decided it would be smart to switch from a full feed to a part feed. [insert loud WTF here]

I know in years gone by that I took a side in favor of this, but I always looked at it from the publishers viewpoint, which in short is all about preventing your feed being scrapped, but I never really considered it from the user/ readers viewpoint. Put simply, to me today a part feed is as useless as tits on a bull. The jury has long since decided that full feeds are the way to go.

So here’s my little bleg: TDH or who ever made the decision, please go back to full feeds. I know the scraping sucks, but it sucks that your readers cant read all the content in a feed reader either. Just as the site was getting good again, you’re now turning people away, and that makes no sense at all.

This is staggering.

Congrats to Michael on a position well deserved. I cant remember if a blogger has ever made the list before, maybe Drudge but he’s never counted himself as a blogger. It’s perhaps a watershed moment that a Blogger can be counted in the Top 100 most influential people in the world, next to world leaders and uber-celebrities.

I’d say blogging has come of age, but that was really 2004. It’s something big though: a new level of maturity perhaps, an acceptance that blogging and bloggers have a major role in todays media landscape.

I was suppose to be at the Future of Journalism summit in Sydney today but I’ve got too many things on to have made it, but I would have love to have bought this up. Perhaps someone will.