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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.
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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)
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.
TwitterCounter
I must have been living in a cave, or just forgotten, but TwitterCounter tracks your Twitter followers (via Ross Hill on FF) Conclusion from my stats: Twitter works best if you be yourself. I quite often share inane things, weather, finance, stuff I find, and sometimes what ever pops into my head, and I wouldn’t […]
Win
Meg updated her Top 100 Australian blogs, the best and fairest top Australian blog list (we can’t even get added to some of the others, go figure) Australia Day. Here’s the result Win. It doesn’t pay the bills I might add, but to be up there after just short of 9 months with the Allure […]
Bleg: Please browser makers, show a where the audio is coming from button
I’ll admit it: I’m a tab fiend. I switched away from IE6 to Firefox all those years ago (when I was still a Windows user) for tabs. Tabs were, and still are the miracle of the modern internet. They allow you to open content and come back to it later. In my case, that’s opening […]
Inquisitr comes in at 7th on Australian Startup Index
The definition is probably a little fluid, but we get included with sites that may be arguably less deserving. Very nice though. The full index here. BTW, anyone know what’s happening with the top 100 Australian blogs index? Meg hasn’t updated since November. I in part understand why: manually calculating the totals must be a […]
Testing Blogo
so far so good….or maybe not…. image didn’t upload. Lets try again.
Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks
The good news going into Christmas for me was strong traffic for The Inquisitr at a time I honestly worried that we might drop right off. Christmas Eve (US time, so my Christmas Day) delivered us our 4th best day for December, and our best day since December 11. We’ve never had any luck with […]
The Inquisitr November
Pageviews: 1,085,598 (per Google Analytics) Traffic profile: highest post accounted for only 5.8% of traffic. Top 5 posts accounted for less than 20% of traffic. Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me) Cash Flow: same as last month, tight. Net 60 on ads, so we won’t be making […]
Syndication Offer
The Huffington Post has an interesting way of syndicating some content. The short version is they run the first three or four paragraphs of a post on their site, then end it with “read more here xyz.” I’m not sure if it’s under legal agreement or not, and as a rule I don’t like running […]
Free Labour
I’m quite bewildered at these multi-million dollar sites/ blogs that get thousands of people writing for them for absolutely nothing. I’m not sure if I’m troubled because of the financial dimension (exploitation) or I’m simply troubled because I’m jealous and I wants me some of that. Hmmmmmm……
Drew’s Strands Tattoo
I love Drew. Here’s a guy who always puts his 110% into everything he does, and he does it so well at the same time. More on the Strands blog here. Click to play
Chumby now legally available in Australia
The Chumby a.k.a The Worlds Dearest Alarm Clock in now available legally in Australia. Internode is the local distribrutor and has it for $299 here. I’ve had mine for at least 6 months, and I love it, but the widget/ content side is overated. Why the hell would I wan’t to browse RSS feeds or […]
Embargo Fail
So I get an email this morning from a company telling me to take down a post because I’d broken their embargo and that me having the post up would effect their ability to get publicity on other sites. The thing is I hadn’t broken it. They’d failed to detail the embargo time properly. The […]
Worst Ballmer interview ever
No, Steve Ballmer actually did a really good job, but the questions had more than a lot to be desired. I caught this originally in the car, and the News Radio announcer continually referred to Ballmer as Bal-a-mer, and I knew it was just going to get worse from there. Here’s some choice questions from […]
YouTube’s geotargeting beyond sucks
So I was trying to view a post on the YouTube blog tonight here. Simple exercise you might thing, but YouTube has decided that any time I visit it, on ANY browser (so it’s not cookie related), I should be redirected to YouTube Australia. No major deal with video content, given the swap out is […]