Category — blogs.com.au Site News

I am back at blogs.com.au HQ so will be resuming blogging with gusto here at The Local. Although I dislike clogging up people’s feed readers on weekends and usually reframe from posting, I thought it was best to get a self indulgent post out of the way tonight.

This afternoon, the small milestone of 5000 active Australian blogs being listed at blogs.com.au was reached. Studio Annetta, a blog by an Australian interior designer based in Hong Kong was blog # 5000.

This is around 4100 more URLs than I originally had when the search engine was started in April last year. During the last nine months, I have visited and tagged all of the blogs in this wonderful collection so can say with confidence that the Australian blogosphere is a thriving and diverse community empowered by personal publishing.

For people wanting to be the first to discover the latest Australian blogs. Every Monday I post the fifty most recent listings which you can get via subscribing to this rss feed.

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.

Please only submit your blog to be search-able at blogs.com.au if it is a legitimate blog.

I know this seems like a captain obvious request but I have recently had a unfortunate increase in the number submissions of spam blogs, generic syndicated article filled blogs, online shopping directories filled with affiliate links and corporate web sites. All of these types of non-blogs will not be included in our list of blogs to be searched.

To the people submitting these sites: You may regard these sites as legitimate money makers but I don’t believe they are a useful resource for the 500+ people a day using this search engine to find what has been written on Australian blogs and therefore reserve the right to not have these spammy type sites listed at blogs.com.au.

Meg Tsiamis’ latest post points to a link that shows the US based Google owned Blogger service is hosting 142,000 Australian blogs.

I need a script that will extract the URLs of these blogs from the profile pages on that link. I’m willing to pay for a developer that can run a script which can do it. Email me at anthony @ blogs .com.au for details and to discuss it further.

I know there is nothing more self-indulgent and therefore boring for a reader of this blog than me saying how good one’s own search engine is but blogs.com.au surprised me last night in a very good way.

Usually when looking for the latest blogs posts from the last 24 hours I use Sphere or Technorati. I know that seems terrible that I don’t use blogs.com.au as much as I could but I am realistic about the limitations of our search facility.

It is powered by Google Co-op. So I had thought the powers that be in the Googleplex only update their index of regular web sites every 12-24 hours so I didn’t think blogs.com.au would a useful tool to get up to the minute search results.

I was thankfully proven wrong after I saw a spike (600+ requests in the last 24 hours) in searches for the terms “The Chaser” and “The Chaser arrested” on the back of the wonderfully reckless hilarity that resulted in the boys getting put in the nick yesterday.

While I knew Aussie bloggers would be blogging about the event, I just didn’t think the search facility was good enough to find them yet. I felt the people searching blogs.com.au for “The Chaser” and “The Chaser arrested” would be have been wasting their time and wouldn’t find anything recent or relevant until maybe today.

Out of curiosity I did a look up on the terms being searched by our visitors and was surprised to find an abundance of results some as fresh as 44 minutes before I conducted the search.

This is great to see and shows that the Google Co-op powered search engine that is blogs.com.au is a great way to find even the most recent posts by local bloggers.

That is more than enough self administered ego stroking for one post. As you were.

I received a request from a journalist yesterday for some statistics about blogs.com.au. While certainly nothing incredible to look at here yet, I’ve posted the numbers at The Local in case anyone else had an interest.

Blogs listed in the search index at the start of each month
April - 912
May - 1445
June - 1894
July - 2107
August - 2314
September - 2561
Note: While we’ve nearly tripled the number of Australian blogs that we know of already, I really would like to get to 10,000 by the end of the year. If you read a local blog but can’t find it by doing a search then please add the blog to our index.

Web Site Traffic Statistics
In March this year before there was a search engine feature or The Local, the domain name parked on a empty holding page received 363 unique visitors. In August, the 5596 unique visitors to blogs.com.au generated 29,454 page views.
Note: Page views don’t include search queries conducted off-site.

Search Engine Usage Statistics
In August, the total number of search queries performed was 8710.

I sheepishly apologise for my two month sabbatical from blogging here at The Local.

Besides a bout of lowproductivityitis I have been insanely busy figuring our what was needed in this social networking overloaded world then working on building the functionality for blogs.com.au to make finding, searching and discovering Australian blogs easy for our visitors.

Over the next week I’ll do the blog equivalent of makeup sex to put things right. Lots of new posts, some excellent Blogs of the Day, links to the 200+ new blogs which I have continued to add to our search index during my blogging break as well as bringing online some of the new features and a new design for blogs.com.au.

Posted by Anthony at 12:14pm 30/08/2007

In the last couple of days we passed the magical number of 2000 Australian blogs that can be searched via blogs.com.au.

While still only a very a small selection of the local blogosphere, we have found over 1200 blogs in the last two months and must thank everyone who has submitted their blog or blogged about our small effort to make it easier to find posts by Australian bloggers.

Hopefully, by the end of July we can reach the next big number, 5000 blogs.

Posted by Anthony at 02:40pm 14/06/2007

…it’s who you know that knows what you want.

Which is why I’m looking for help locating any State or Federal MPs or Senators who are blogging, using Myspace or posting videos to Youtube.

With the federal election coming up in 3-4 months, I thought it would be good to focus some attention here at The Local on Australian politicians who are reaching out to the people by taking advantage of social media.

Send any examples of our elected representatives blog related efforts to anthony [at] blogs [dot] com [dot] au and I’ll do a series of posts through June. Should be interesting.

Posted by Anthony at 02:50pm 31/05/2007