Category — Uncategorized

New York blogger, protocelebrity and web entrepreneur Julia Allison whom I’ve previously mentioned here at The Local as well as at my other blogs (fascination or infatuation, anyone??? actually don’t answer that), was profiled on Saturday in a cover story in the Sydney Morning Herald’s and The Age’s Good Weekend magazine.

Over the last 18 months, for many bloggers especially those who use the Tumblr platform or read the snarky NYC gossip blog Gawker, it was hard to ignore Julia Allison. Describing her as ubiquitous would not be improper use of the adjective. So much so that as @rainbowhill mentioned to me on Twitter: that one only has to read those initials (JA) to know who the f she is after I said that Allison was brought up by an attendee at a short course on blogging I was giving two weeks ago.

Which is why after the outrage and vitriol on blogs that followed a story about herself on the cover of Wired magazine I was expecting something of a mini storm over the Good Weekend story. Even some mild indignation by Australian bloggers. But the reaction from the Aussosphere has been kind of lacklustre to say the least. Including myself with this blog post, it seems only four Australians care about Julia Allison. Just two Twitter posts by @jjprojects and @lachlanhardy and a blog post from back in September by writer/journo/blogger Rachel Hills who described that Good Weekend running a profile on Allison made her feel tired and bored more than anything else. ‘Twas a good prediction for what mostly everyone’s reaction would be.

Why no outrage? As Gawker pointed out, when you can follow her blog which already contains all the juicy details a profile seems beside the point and out of date by the time it goes to print but I think it is more that people are just over or her type of self-promoting vacuous style of blogging. Yay for discerning blog reading tastes!

Still, I really thought the Aussie Bloggers message board with their committed group of local blogging enthusiasts who are always keen to take down a high profile mainstream blogebrity could muster up a thread on JA. I guess not. Poor Julia.

“There’s a person in here. And I have feelings too, whether it’s about politics, the person I’m seeing, the person I’m not seeing. That’s my way of connecting. I don’t want people to think that I’m just an empty f**king whatever.“ (source)

(found via buy her candy)

Saw in my Tumblr dashboard via Something Changed that the identities behind the pseudonyms “The Hack” and “Caz” from the once very popular and particularly spiteful but now defunct blog The Spin Starts Here have been revealed.

This is pretty big news, especially to anyone who was around the blogosphere a few years ago but a fair outing considering the hateful attacks they used to dish out to other bloggers under the veil of anonymity the web afforded them.

You can read the whole story and back story of The Spin Starts Here at http://jamieduncan.wordpress.com

Joel Postman has a spot on post arguing that claiming oneself to be a blogger is now a misnomer:

A blog is a tool. There is no such thing as “a blogger,” or someone who can be rationally defined by their ability to use a blog, no more so than there are “wordists,” people who define themselves based on their ability to use MS Word. The number of people who blog is now so large, and the things they blog about and the reasons they use blogs so diverse, that classifying someone as a blogger doesn’t makes sense.

The rest of the post is well worth a read.

I’m off making changes to my business cards right now.

I collect so many blogging links during general www surfing that instead of doing a proper post on each one I find a quick linkblog about blogging satisfies my desire to announce them to the Aussosphere.

1. A successful entrepreneur has vowed to give up public speaking and focus more on blogging

2. A heartening story that despite the great firewall of china, 20 per cent of bestselling books in China now stem from online literature like blogs. The interesting thing I take from this is that in countries like Australia that already have an established publishing industry structure very few books originate from an online form and are turned into books. Local publishers need to wake up to some o the gold that exist online.

3. A quick guide on finding images to use in your blog posts.

4. While I can’t say I have read or heard anyone specifically say micro-blogging tools like Twitter or online social networks were going to bring about blogging’s demise. Still, one of the Aussie Bloggers has outlined a strong case to why blogging won’t be a replaced anytime soon.

5. There’s another push for a blogging code. This time by a UK law firm. They’ve published a lot of stats about how unaware of legal issues people are but very little detail on their proposed code.

6. Back in the day (’98 + ‘99) there used to be a online service called Web Site Garage that was run by Netscape where you could put your site through to evaluate a number of factors before publishing to the web. One of the features I appreciated most was the spell check. For some reason the whole service went offline and was never replaced. Until now. There’s a soon to be launched service called Spellr.us that will offer a free spell checking service to make sure your blog doesn’t appear by someone who didn’t graduate from Grade 4. I really need this service.

7. A reminder for people a little obsessed with blogging. ‘Tis fun to do but only in moderation.

8. I usually avoid the Blogging VS Journalism debates as I find they focus on the utterly pointless but did find this quote offered an interesting perspective: “…bloggers who are unconstrained by the cold, objective, impersonal style required by Modern Journalism can more easily present themselves as more credible — sincere, authentic, and vulnerable.” (via The Future of News)