Why is it, in 2008, that blogs in Australia are still not considered mainstream by many, still derided by the media and rarely breaking big news, unlike blogs in the United States, where blogging is mainstream, blogs are often the first port of call for breaking and big news, and where the line between blogging and the media has become so blurred that it’s difficult at the top to tell them apart?

We know that there has never been a break out blog in Australia that targets Australian news. We have great bloggers in many fields, and are strongly represented in the blogosphere, perhaps statistically more so than our population would dictate, and yet our blogging success stories tend to be global stories. Your Darren Rowse or your Yaro Staracks, even the likes of Tim Blair, News Corp deal aside, relied on an American audience more than an Australian one. There are prominent bloggers in Australia who do write for an Australian audience and I don’t seek to belittle what they do, but where’s our Andrew Sullivan, our Drudge or Daily Kos. Why don’t we see our own version of Michelle Malkin on TV, or a Robert Scoble turn up to the opening of an envelope?

There are several schools of thought. That we are behind the United States is a given, and I’ve usually put the figure at 5 years. The blogosphere here feels like the blogosphere in the US in around 2003, prior to the 2004 Presidential election where blogging came of age. There’s the psychological argument that Australian’s aren’t as open as our American friends, that we are more reserved and less likely to publish what we think at will that has stifled our progress. There is a good case against heritage media, who takes nearly every opportunity to bag blogs and blogging, fearful of competition as their glory days pass and the end of their business models are nigh. But there’s one factor we can’t change, one factor that continues to stifle local growth in blogging, and that is numbers.

Numbers dictate that there is not a big enough audience in Australia to sustain mass locally focused and profitable blogging.

It’s why I’ve never launched an Australian focused blog. Some people were suggesting to me last year that there needs to be a TechCrunch for Australia. My response was that there’s not a big enough audience here to sustain such a site. I’ve looked in past years at other vertical spaces, and I keep finding the same problem: great idea, audience is too small.

The reality is that for most wanting to make blogging a full time living in Australia, they have to target an overseas audience.

There are some exceptions. There’s the Auto blog guy who is suppose to be turning 6 figures on a car blog on a .com.au address. I’d bet though that most of his traffic wasn’t Australian. There’s people like Bronwen Clune and Paul Montgomery, who have turned their blogging come tech plays into reasonable money earners, through a combination of tapping into some premium advertising and working in desirable niche spaces. Allure Media’s Gawker titles are going ok the last I heard, but they had a couple of advantages: a pile of money to hire journalists up front, and a redirect deal with Nick Denton that saw Australian traffic hitting the US sites ending up on the Australian sites. Crikey is going where no Australian blogging network has gone before, buying in some great talent and traffic to give them a solid start out of the gate.

But that’s pretty close to it. I may have missed a few, so apologies if I’ve missed you (and please don’t be offended) but I can say with clear certainty that at most I’ve missed is less than I can count fingers on my hands.

No amount of spin changes the fact that we have a small market with limited opportunities. I don’t believe that this means that some won’t make it, nor do I believe that it would be impossible to build a blog today and score the breakthrough we collectively need, but it is that much harder for us all. We’re better of respecting that the tyranny of numbers works against us, and being more creative in response.

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While waiting for the obligatory “global warming is to blame” commentary, we’ve got the storm covered at The Inquisitr: Hurricane Ike Live.

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New South Wales is the political gift state that keeps on giving, this time with the newly sworn in Police Minister (3 days into the job) being forced to resign for dancing semi-naked in (the NSW) Parliament House and simulating a sex act on a female MP. Just for an extra touch of class, Matt Brown is said to have yelled out to the daughter of the MP he was on top of “Look at this, I’m titty f&^king your mother.”

Let’s just say I’ve seen worse from elected representatives

Here’s the little secret though you won’t read in the press: most MP’s are pissheads. Maybe not all, because you do get your occasional teetotaler who takes the job very seriously, or the god botherer who has decided that gods will doesn’t involve a $40 bottle of red, or if you’re in the ALP, a cartoon of beer. But a significant portion of them are, and probably a majority.

It could be the Australian culture of drinking on speed, a casual drink turning into more under the pressure cooker of politics. No matter what you may think of politicians, there is one given that should never be in dispute: they work extremely long hours, and rarely get a proper break. That they can kick back with some staffers or fellow MPs at the end of a day in their Parliamentary offices in Canberra, Melbourne, Perth or which ever state they are in may be their only escape.

Side note: in the last Federal Parliament, two WA Liberal MP’s owned vineyards. Mal Washer knows how to make a decent wine, Prosser’s wine was like vinegar, at least for the first two vintages. But I digress.

There is a serious drinking culture in politics, not just at the branch level. Parties such as the one that has surfaced today are legend among Canberra staffers in particular (I only did a few Canberra trips when I was working for Slippery Pete in the late 90s), although 99% of them will never surface in the press.

Let me tell you why these stories rarely surface: because it’s not uncommon for the journalists to be joining in the fun. If MP’s are pissheads, a good portion of the older members of the Australian press pack are permanently fortified. And lets face it, you don’t rat on your mates, do you?

Does anyone really believe that no one in the press knew of the Matt Brown story before today?

Talking of damaged brain cells, Mark Day has gone on an anti-blog rant in The Oz today. According to Day, journalism can only be practiced by journalists working for private companies that are profitable, because apparently blogs don’t make money and don’t employ journalists. Better still: all blogs are bad because (OMG) commenters on blogs can be nasty. Where do you start on that logic?

Better still, given the only news being created is from newspapers, it shouldn’t go online until later

Branded newspaper sites will hold an advantage over others, such as telcos and search engines, because they generate news. It makes sense to me that more newspapers will follow the lead of The Philadelphia Inquirer by reverting to a model where the news stories it breaks appear first in print. Why, if there is value attached to revealing these stories, should they be given away firston the net? They’ll find their way there soon enough.

And of course, the decline in newspaper circulations is our fault, not the fault on the newspapers themselves…

If not enough of us are willing to support the costly process of maintaining a vibrant, democracy-enhancing fourth estate, whose fault is that?

Let me answer that Mark: it’s your fault.

You can read any of the various other pieces I’ve written in relation to this debate, so I won’t repeat the arguments again now, but I will say this: the notion of heritage media being the last vestige of virtue in a sea of swill is complete and utter bollocks. The difference between a blogger and journalist is that a blogger knows he is biased, a journalist pretends that they’re not. Journalism in this country, particularly political coverage, has long since been the play thing of factions and power brokers, and we never see the full picture in a story. The drunk journalist filling his glass from the drunk MP is more compromised than 99% of all bloggers on the planet. We need bloggers to keep journalism honest, and to fill in the gaps where heritage media is regularly letting us down. We also need bloggers around so there’s someone to cover the news when the bulk of heritage media ceases to exist.

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Sign up here.

This was run in Sydney recently, and looks like a great event. Dates are 3-5 October.

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When I met Chris Pirillo for the first time at Gnomedex, I apologized for not getting down on my knees and doing the hero worshiping thing, because (as I told him) I both suck at it and I’m not the least bit interested in doing so. The context of the comment was meant to be humorous, but the content itself was accurate: I don’t do hero worshiping, and I’m bad at pretending to.

Now Chris Pirillo perhaps deserves some hero worshiping, if only for remaining a down to earth, normal guy who finds it hard to go to the shitter without 2000 people asking for details on his live stream (he also runs a kickass conference). But many others don’t deserve it. In overcoming heritage media, and falsely constructed ideals of celebrity delivered to us by marketing machines, we have only created new heroes, instead of abandoning the idea altogether.

It doesn’t sit well with me. Both that collectively we blindly hero worship the flawed, or even that some should seek to place me on a similar pedestal.

I’ve written previously that I don’t do “celebrity pictures,” or as a so nicely put it, I’m not a camera whore. I’ve met many “famous” people along my path to the point in time. When I worked at the WACA I’d met or spoken to, briefly or sometimes longer, most of the Australian Cricket Team, many who wanted tickets to the members and were told to come and see me. In my years in politics, I’ve pissed next to the then Prime Minister, watched at close quarters the then Treasurer get so ratfaced he couldn’t deliver his speech without slurring his words. I’ve shaken hands at one stage or another with most of the Cabinet, and I’d even fought over policy at conferences with guys who went on to become senior ministers. I’ve sat in a car, drunk with, or emailed a good portion of the past Liberal leaders in Western Australia. Can I say though, for all this name dropping, I wasn’t on a first name basis with most of these people, where as she who must be obeyed was on the politics side.

In tech, I’ve flirted around the edges of the fame game, having shook hands with guys like Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg, and probably a whole pile of other people as well.

Guess what: sorry to be crude, but I just don’t give a shit about having met them.

They are all people, flawed people who through a combination of skill, luck and often ruthlessness and pure personal drive, have succeeded.

At some stages in the past, I’ve been called an “A-List” blogger, although this has tended to be seasonal, given that I was on the B-List for a long time. It wasn’t enough for me to get a speaking gig at the Blog World Expo, so it may not count for much But more seriously, there is little difference between me and most bloggers. Where I am today has as much to do with luck, beer, and pure stupidity as it does with skill. Lets see: I was indecisive about what to blog about in 2002, so I decided to blog about blogging before anyone else was, and it just happened to be the right place, right time. On a whim, I sent out an email that ended up resulting in b5media. I was on a non-compete and had no idea what I was going to do next when Arrington emailed me, probably because after the Natalia Del Conte thing, no one in their right minds would have worked at TechCrunch at that time. I could have stayed at TechCrunch (before things turned sour, which was 1 month after I left..before then I was always a loyal and dutiful 110% team member), and asked Arrington for more money, or better still, some equity in TechCrunch that he boasted in the press that everyone who worked for him got, but was never extended to me. I’m sure she who must be obeyed would have preferred that I would have done that, but instead, I picked a completely unproven mix on a blog, with a smallish budget, and hoped for the best, when I could have picked any specific vertical and would have probably been delivering 3x as many page views today (indeed more if I’d gone into celeb blogging f/t).

I am completely and utterly insane, with some serious luck thrown in for measure.

I’d lie that there weren’t times where I have found the attention flattering, and that there have been some great times along the way. And yet I’m really not any different to most people I meet.

I laugh sometimes when people meet me in person and say things along the lines of “I didn’t know what you’d be like in person, but you’re really not that bad/ ok.” I shouldn’t laugh, it scares me that people could think that.

And yet, sometimes leading has a positive side. In my Blog Herald days, my best moments were when people emailed me and said that I’d inspired them to start blogging. I have no idea how many people that holds true for, but even if it was 5 people, that’s 5 people I gave the gift of blogging to. I take great joy today when people say that they’ve tried Disqus because I’m using them, and that they’re seeing more comments on their blogs, or to the companies I wrote about at TechCrunch, who used my post as a springboard to greater things. I feel a need to inject realism into debates, pointing out to many in the echochamber that there is a world outside Web 2.0…whether they take it onboard is another thing. I’ve done a dozen speaking gigs or more in the last 2 years, where I’ve tried to share the gift of social media to others, and afterwards people have come up and said that hearing me speak has inspired them to try. That’s the good side of attention.

Perhaps we do need leaders, heroes, champions. But there is a line, one between respect/ inspiration and false idolatry. I’m never going to handle fame, on any extent well, but god help me if it ever goes to me head. If there is one message I can deliver: you can do it to. I’m proof positive that it can be done

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September 5 marked the 4 month mark for The Inquisitr, and although I’m a little late with this post, some updated figures and observations.

We closed August with 420,000 page views, and this is before I noticed that Google Analytics was under-counting, likely due to page load times. Based on the top leaderboard spot, the figure was around the 460,000 mark.

It was a very good month, and I doubt very much if we’ll repeat it, but certainly I’m hopeful of a result above the 200,000 mark for September, hopefully more again. 1 week in and we’re just shy of 70,000 page views, so we’re off to a solid start, even if it’s not spectacular.

RSS subscriptions remain an issue, an under performing aspect of the site. Around the 3000 mark across the four feeds (I didn’t total them for the post), but off from a peak in early August, but slowly climbing again.

Technorati rank has been tough. The indexing went down for our two biggest days in August, so we missed what should have been a huge boost, and we malingered just shy of the top 2000 mark for nearly a week. Since then its started to move again, but as I suspected, the closer we got to the top 1000, the slower the rank improves as you need more and more links to climb the ladder. 1692nd as I write this, with just short of 2 months to get to the top 1000 based on knowing that the stats Technorati use are 6mths worth of links…basically, as we add incoming links, we can only go up until 6 months, when it will level out somewhat.

On the advertising front, we’ve signed a 6 month agreement with an ad supplier with the ad units to start in the next day or two. More details once the ads are up. Unfortunately it’s US inventory only, but if they deliver the rates they’re talking about, The Inquisitr should break even, and maybe even turn a small profit for the first time, not allowing for me to get paid out of that

Overall: at the 3 month mark I was starting to stress a bit, not because the site wasn’t performing well, but because it wasn’t performing well enough to cover costs. Ask me in a month and I’ll tell you if those fears were unfounded, but JR + Meieli have rallied around the site, and collectively we’re getting more things right now than before. It’s getting close…..

Update: I should have added, if only Awstats figures were actual page views, because we broke 1 million page views according to Awstats in August…I know, I wish

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Interesting piece in The Oz today on the Terria consortium bidding for the $4.7b in Government largese for the regularly delayed and sent to committee National Broadband Network.

Anyone but Telstra should be the mantra of all fair minded people, and yet they’re asking for more than money, they want a monopoly as well:

“Our proposition to the Government is that no party be allowed to expand the network and operate in competition to the national broadband network,” Terria bid manager Michael Simmons said.

Because of Australia’s size and population this network must be a monopoly and must be structurally separated. If you don’t have a structurally separated monopoly network where access prices are regulated, it will not be viable.

“So you must preclude any alternative broadband network.”

So they want to be another Telstra of sorts, and preclude competition. Mmmmm…..

The positives: structural separation is a must no matter who wins. Access prices regulated by Government authority makes the NBN an essential service, and there’s positives in taking the pricing away from the operator.

In terms of Telstra, the we won’t build it without Government support is rubbish. Telstra have an appalling track record of using its market position and power to bully the competition, even where that competition steps in where Telstra has had no interest. What would happen when Broadband Connect 1 was in place was that a small telco would set up shop in the small country town, offering ADSL where Tesltra had no interest previously. The moment Telstra got wind that the telco was coming to town, often before they launched they would enable ADSL in the exchange and write to every person in the town encouraging them to sign up. When it wasn’t before the fact, it was shortly after, but without fail Telstra would only appear in country towns when a small competitor appeared first. And when I say country towns, I mean seriously small towns 2-3k, one town had less than 1,000 people on the list I remember.

It would be fair to presume that Telstra would cherry pick the most profitable areas of the NBN rollout for itself, making it a harder ask for Terria to make a quid.

And yet, a locked in monopoly creates new issues. What if, in the next 3-5 years, new technology comes along that is better than provided in the NBN. Will not creating a monopoly stifle innovation and slow progression in data speeds, which despite the Government talking about 12mbps, should be looking at 100mbps and beyond?

Protection from Telstra should be looked at, but not at the cost of preventing future players offering better technology that improves the overall good.

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I’ve seen similar figures before, but they still amaze me. The Oz reports that job ads are down in Australia, a sure sign of a slowing economy. But the interesting part is in the divide between online and print. According to the numbers, weekly job advertisements in Australian newspapers averaged 15,105 a week in August, vs 234,009 online per week.

You did read that right. 234,009 jobs a week online, 15,105 in print. The online jobs market in Australia is now 15.6x larger than the print market. Print now delivers only 6% of all job ads in Australia where as ten years ago the figure would have been close to 100%.

Seek.com.au, the nations leading job site, launched in March 1998.

We know that real estate and cars sales are heading in the same direction. Niche publications target the general classifieds market (Trading Post/ Quokka). This is the bread and butter of newsprint, and it’s disappearing in our life time in Australia, and strangely enough, at a likely quicker rate than the United States.

Our newspapers are slimmer and leaner than their American cousins, thanks to the consolidation in the late 80s, early 90s, and news.com.au and the Fairfax titles rank well in terms of internet traffic, a small saving grace. And yet, denied the one thing that has kept them going for so long, there will be pain and blood letting ahead.

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So the Libs managed a 6% swing in Western Australia, and although the result is a hung Parliament with the rabid Nats calling the shots, it was a remarkable result by any stretch of the imagination for the Liberals, given 4 leaders in as many years, and a party that spends more time knifing each other than the ALP.

Like many, I called a Liberal wipeout early on, but the polls showed otherwise, and the result speaks for itself.

Between talking to people on the ground (given I no longer live in the State) and from commentary online, the picture was fairly clear. Voters rejected the negative campaign of the Carpenter Government, and instead went for Barnett who from all accounts ran a small target, safe campaign, that wasn’t overly negative but instead focused on key policy messages. Couple that with the cynical move to call the election early, which apparently was popping up as a reason among swinging voters to vote against the Government.

The end of negative politics perhaps, at least as a tool for incumbents?

Kevin07 is another example. Focus on the leader, leadership, fresh ideas. Highlight the negatives of the Government without obsessing over them as your only selling point, which is the strategy that won 2004 for Howard, but lost 2007.

Question being though: is this a significant shift in the electorate, or simply the result of longer term Governments approaching their used by dates?

We’ll see. Consider the Obama campaign in the US that has gone for the most part positive against an amazing barrage of negative campaigning from McCain (amazing in an Australian sense, you have to visit the US to believe it as online doesn’t relay the depth of the campaign). Have voters in Western democracies had enough of the politics of old?

I hope so. The negativity is one of the very reasons I’m happy I’m not involved in politics today.

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