Defamer Australia to launch tonight

We were going to start blogging here at The Local on Monday with an Australian Blog of the Day series but big news in the part of the Australian blogosphere that we inhabit has accelerated our first post.

Gawker’s Australian licensed publishers Allure Media/Netus (owned by News Limited) will see their second local blog launch this weekend with Defamer Australia going online tonight (Sunday) at 7pm doing a Live blogging event of the opening night of the Big Brother TV show.

Defamer Australia will be a localised version of the uber-popular Hollywood gossip blog http://defamer.com. Currently all that is online at http://www.defamer.com.au is a holding page (screenshot) with the tag line The gossip rag Australia had to have. Nice.

The delightful Jess McGuire has grabbed the enviable blogging job as Defamer Australia Editor.

Aussie bloggers and blog readers would know Jess from the pop-culture blog Ausculture and as a late-night radio regular on Melbourne’s RRR as well as recently being heard occasionally all around the country on JJJ doing midnight till dawn shifts.

Jess says in her farewell post at Ausculture:

You’re hearing it here first, dear readers. Through a clever combination of single entendres, emails containing nothing but photos of walruses holding/losing buckets, and seven compromising Polaroids featuring my new employer after a couple of bottles of Jose Cuervo licking liquid chocolate off the southerly cheeks of a Dutch dwarf porn star, I managed to convince someone to hire me and I will now be (un)gainfully employed as editor of Defamer Australia. This will be nice. Until I am fired.

Will be very interesting to see how this goes.

Jess is a brilliant blogger and the Defamer style/tone hasn’t been done here in Australia via such a well packaged blog so I’m guessing it will be a definite success. So long as the quantity of Australian celebrity content (I’m sure with the plethora of reality tv celebs going through the revolving doors of fame that Defamer Australia will be fine) makes it different enough from the US edition, bloggers, readers and publishers of will be happy.

Gizmodo Australia looks like it was the first localised version of a Gawker blog to launch today with it being edited by established journo/blogger, Seamus Byrne. Gizmodo is already up and running with posts published but as yet no official announcement.

Posted by Anthony at 3:30pm 22/04/2007

Update: 8:15pm 22/04/2007
- Gizmodo’s launch post, explains local posts coming Monday.
- Defamer Oz goes live, read the welcome post.
- As promised, Defamer brilliantly live blogging BB.