A look at the Australian blogosphere by blogs.com.au

LOL

Copyright pictures for sad children and found on Tumblr via Did You Ever Notice?

Nominations are now open for the 8th Annual Weblog Awards.

Previous winners of the Best Australian or New Zealand weblog category were:

2007 The Breakfast Blog

2006 Loobylu

2005 What’s New, Pussycat?

2004 Loobylu

2003 Loobylu

So go spread the love and nominate your favourite Australian blogs at http://2008.bloggies.com

You have until Friday, January 11, 2008 to nominate your favorites. Then 3 panels of 50 randomly selected voters will be involved in the 2nd round of voting to determine the finalists in each category from the list of initial nominations. Then voting will open again on January 22 to decide the overall winners which will be announced in early March.

A complicated voting process but it certainly provides worthy recognition for a blog that gets through it with the honour of an award.

Story found via Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ.

via 30+ different people on Tumblr.

Photo by Ryan Orr (CC license).

I wish the readers of The Local and all of Australia’s bloggers a very happy Christmas and New Year!

I sincerely appreciate the people who read this blog. I’m thankful for your attention. I would especially like to thank the people who took the time to comment. Receiving a comment is humbling and pleasing because you know someone is listening. Muchos gracias.

I do hope that 2007 has been a great year for you as it has for me. It was year of renewal and learning that I have enjoyed.

And I wish that 2008 brings you much success, happiness and good health.

For the people who can’t get enough blogging about blogging, I’ve got a few posts scheduled (thank you WordPress for your timestamp feature) for the couple of weeks after Christmas while I’m unplugged from the matrix. Nasty tricks of blackhat SEO bastards, review of Australian blogging in 2007, details of the business blogging aggregator that will be launching in January which will be the precursor to 50 or so Australian topic focused microsphere aggregators here at blogs.com.au in 2008 and some useful blogging resolutions to get more out of your blog right from the start of the new year. So if your are not at the beach, buried in a book, watching the cricket or doing any one of the other multitude of summer possibilities then at least some blogging about blogging exists for you here at The Local.

Anthony
Officially unplugged from the matrix.

Forbes’ list of the Top 25 Web Celebrities has been revealed and Melbourne blogger Darren Rowse from ProBlogger made the list coming in at #25.

Congrats!

Anyone who is interested in potentially making some cash from their blog but hasn’t read ProBlogger should go have a look. Everything there is to be known about blog monetisation among many other things like writing tips and blog management ideas is there. All his posts are based on experience and success while being presented via an unromanticised view of how much hard work is required to make problogging a full time job.

Link blogging about blogging. Because I like it.

1. Very sad news this week with the Alive in Baghdad blogger being found murdered in his home. Laurel Papworth has a superb post that provides further details and gives some personal perspective to the situation.
1. On Monday just past, it was the the ten year anniversary of when Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog”. He spoke to Wired Magazine and gives his Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers.
1. One of the ABC blogs, Dools Gold by comedian Scott Dooley, is the fourth most viewed page on the ABC web site.
   
   This is one of my fave blogs under the funny folder in my RSS reader. Admittedly, only Scott Adams’ The Dilbert Blog and Dools Gold have been subscribed to in that folder but it is still not surprising to me that it gets excellent traffic. I’m also certain ABC’s entertainment/gossip blog The Shallow End is one of the most popular pages on the ABC web site.
   
   It is encouraging to see that blogs are becoming popular at the national broadcaster. Because the flow on effect for the rest of the Aussosphere is that people uncertain with what blogs are will experience them at the ABC then maybe look into reading other blogs and might even consider blogging themselves.
1. Best. Spam. Comment. Ever.
1. Search engines have been releasing their annual search trends in the last week or so but now BuzzLogic has announced their list of the hottest topics in the blogosphere this year.

With the festive season almost upon us, I felt Local Food Feast was a worthwhile choice as our Blog of the Day.

Local Food Feast is using their blog to invite people from all over Australia to feast on foods grown in their bio region for 7 days during the festive season (December 24 to January 1). Then participants will share their experiences, recipes and ideas via the blog.

Eating locally looks like a wonderful way to support local farmers while reducing reduce your impact on the environment and the Local Food Feast blog will go a great job connecting people taking part in this challenge. Well done!

I found this blog via Friends of the Earth which I found via Solidariti.

I’m always annoyed at statements like blogs have never completely lived up to their early hype as written in an otherwise good opinion piece about blogging in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by Sam Roggeveen, editor of the Lowy Institute blog.

I’ve been blogging and following everything that is the blogosphere for 5 years. So I read with interest the posts and articles during the phenomenal growth period when blogging started to take off. To me, the overall feeling towards blogs by bloggers in the early days was nothing but excitement at observing this personal publishing platform be embraced so quickly and passionately by so many.

I really don’t think there was ever an exaggerated publicity to pump up blogging to be something it was not. This is shown when a Google search of “blogs will replace newspapers” brings up a lame 17 results and when “bloggers will replace journalists” displays an even more a pitiful 11 results. I’ve always felt the hype surrounding blogging of what blogs could do was nothing more than a overly defensive myth perpetuated by those outside of the blogosphere.

While the exciting concepts of organised citizen journalism initiatives and problogging that Roggeveen mentions as evidence of blogging’s failure are both still growing in Australia. I think these are a poor basis to judge blogging’s success.

Like I said, Overhyped, but blogs are here to stay is worth a read but it is a shame that the writer felt he had to disparage blogging before getting down to worthwhile commentary about how blogs have evolved into a useful tool for the political process.

Something which surprised me back in April when I first started the hunt to add more Australian blogs to the blogs.com.au index was that I saw a number of “couple blogs”. These are blogs where two people in a relationship would set-up a blog so they could both record everything about their relationship. I had no idea these existed.

Even though I’m a blogging evangelist who believes people, large companies, small businesses, charities, journalists, teachers and politicians should all blog. I felt less than enthusiastic about these blogs because there was something about couple blogging that felt a little too personal to be announced to the world and archived. You know, the Internet being forever and all. It just made me question if things didn’t work out in that relationship whether both people would want that recorded online in 1, 5 or 10 years time.

The recent example of a New York tech couple, Jakob Lodwick and Julia Allison, who set up JakobandJulia.com, made me doubt my original feelings towards the subject. Right up until the point it exploded in a ugly mess of nasty posts making the cynical jaded bitter commitment phob inside of me rejoice that couple blogging really was fraught with danger.

Even though it was started with clear boundaries via a Memorandum of Understanding and things blogged along quite well for the first two weeks. Cracks started to appear when Julia ironically posted that she was annoyed about being informed of things in her boyfriend’s life only via his blog. It then went downhill very quickly with unpleasant back and forth posts.

It was interesting to watch from afar but had that uncomfortable feeling like having to overhear couples bitching at each other in the line at the supermarket. Clearly I could have avoided it by not adding it to my feed reader but that would mean I would not be an observer of sensational subjects. Still, I’m hopping these blogs doesn’t infiltrate into the blogosphere in any large number. I just would not have the time to voyeuristically keep up with them all

Stephen Collins, a Canberra based freelancer who deals with the Government has an interesting chat about Government 2.0 in the latest episode of On The Pod with Duncan Riley.

For those unable to spend 48 minutes listening to the whole podcast and are most interested in blogging, there is a great chat between 5:35 - 10:15 about the discussion paper into the possibility of the Federal Government starting a blog to facilitate the discussion of policy.