Why the flurry of Australian blogging activity?
2 May 2007
Is it just me or does there seem to a lot of positive movement in the local blogosphere right now?
It’s wonderful to see but what is the reason behind it? It’s certainly not a result of Australia’s broadband uptake but I am struggling to put my finger on what has set it off.
In general I think it is a fair comment that we’ve lagged behind other countries when it comes to personal publishing. However, in the last couple of months Meg and Craig started seperate Top 100 lists, two local Gawker blogs started, the much talked about blogging conference looks like it will go ahead in August, Crikey has been doing a special article series in recent weeks looking at the major newspaper blogs, Weblogger Meetup Groups in Sydney and Melbourne seem to be much more active and now Google launches their first ever local blog here in Australia. These are pretty significant events that I think are reflective of a greater acceptance of blogging in our fine country.
It is incredibly good to see but I am curious to know why.
Any thoughts?
Posted by Anthony at 10:32am 02/05/2007
8 comments… read them below or add one
The more important question, why not? I’ve been blogging 5-6 years across various sites, and for the better part of those years I’ve been interacting with other Australian bloggers trying to get some collective promotion happening, the question isn’t why now, but why not last year, or the year before. Lets hope that it’s the start of more good things to come.
Thanks for commenting Duncan.
Why not? is a valid question to raise.
My theory is that while there are many hundreds of thousands of local bloggers because they are using overseas hosted domains, whether that be on blogspot style services or their own domain on a USA based server, their posts are just not getting found by Internet users via search engines because they do not appear in the “pages from Australia” option.
If the majority of Australian Internet users aren’t coming across local blogs in their everyday searching then the awareness of the Aussie blogging community will be low.
Like you said, I also hope these recent events point to the greater emergence of local blogging.
Anthony
I agree with your comment that many Aussie blogs just aren’t appearing on the “pages from Australia” (my blog is one of those, being on WordPress). It’s a real shame that we don’t have a VIABLE blog host in Australia.
That said, Aussie blog search initiatives like http://blogs.com.au will go a long way towards helping us find each other.
Congrats again on the great job with that and “The Local” as well.
Thanks Meg.
I’ve got a long way to go but am enjoying this more than anything else I’ve done recently.
Yes, I’d also say why not, and about time! (though I only first heard of blogs in 05, and set one up straight away, haha!)
I think we were just behind a bit (as with many things), but I think we’ll get to the same ‘level’ eventually.
Interesting about the US server thing(like you mentioned on my blog), I never knew that, and I’m very glad I chose an Australian host!!
Btw, where’s the lastest info about the blogging conference, is it really going ahead?
Nice to see you here Simone!
I’ll chase up any current info on the blogging conference and post it on the home page of blogs.com.au.
There are very few people that know about the requirements needed to appear in local search engine results pages.
Shameless Plug: One very small upcoming side-project of mine is called Hosted in Australia. It will be a small information resource developed to help promote the local web hosting industry by educating web site owners and bloggers about this issue to ensure that their sites are easily found by web users.
I Have been wondering the same thing of late. My best guess is that in the collective minds of the media blogs have finally made it from being considered the domain of kids and geeks to acceptance as a bona fide medium that should be taken seriously
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