Top Australian Blogs

Hey Meg and Darren!

We’re based out of Sydney, Australia. Our blog just started a couple of weeks ago, but we’re definitely climbing the ranks pretty quickly. Right now all three writers are Australian, but we will be adding some international ones shortly, so I suppose we might not count :-(

http://freelanceswitch.com

Wouldn’t it be great if Technorati could produce these sidebar widgets like Craig has produced but you could filter them for any tag i.e. nationality, topic, gender, etc?

That would be sensational!!

@Sharon – we’re the best blogger! And incredibly humble too…

Mouahahaha!!!

Craig and Meg have done a fantastic job compiling these lists. I’ve already found some great Aussie blogs which would have probably gone unnoticed by me if these lists weren’t around.

I’ve exchanged comments and emails on this subject with Craig and Meg myself over the past week, because I’ve been lucky enough to find myself on this list too!

I even blogged about it a few days ago!

Spooky timing :)

Cheers for the heads up Darren.

Great list Meg.

Now I have a challenge. To try and break into this list!

Just responding to your comment over at Catallaxy – you know what you wrote so I won’t repeat it here.

Thanks Darren. It looks like this post has had the effect of making us look snippy and snarky, which wasn’t the aim. Rafe is known as one of the politest bloggers around Ozplogistan (Australian political blogs). If it’s any use to you, I’ll repeat what I wrote over at Duncan Riley’s site (he got really annoyed by this post) in the hope of providing clarification and hosing everyone down. My reference to snippyness refers to Duncan, not you – he did get reasonably cranky.

Catallaxy is a group blog. One of our staffwriters wrote that observation based on information provided by Tim Blair. Yes, it was probably a tad on the snippy side, but there are eight of us, not one, all with different takes on the world.

I write for Club Troppo as well, one of the blogs I note that you’ve visited. Similarly, Jacques – who is also only one of a number of writers – is the only other libertarian (besides me) at Club Troppo.

For my part, I suspect what we’re seeing in the blog world is the same division that happened to newspapers and novels a century ago – a division into ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’, a division into audiences based on markerting and an audience based on chewing the political fat.

FWIW I still suspect that Tim Blair would be Australia’s most popular blogger, in part because he doesn’t divide his energies among several blogs and has a huge US readership. That doesn’t mean I somehow think less of those who – to use Jacques’ phrase – are into more full-on capitalism, like the gentleman from ProBlogger. Both he and Tim make a very nice living from blogging. We at Troppo and Catallaxy, by contrast, make pocket money and pay our hosting fees :)

What it does highlight is the need to come up with a metric that does measure popularity accurately. Sitemeter and Technorati are helpful in this respect, Alexa less so because many people refuse to install it (it behaves like spyware on Unix and Mac machines, and is banned in many workplaces).

So save the snippyness (it looks like we’re square on that score by now); elitism exists all over the place. We at Catallaxy (and Troppo) showed how it can emerge even in the blogging world, and if it’s any consolation it’s not something I care about. Nor, for that matter, does Jason Soon, Catallaxy’s editor. He truly does not care – as long as people show up in the comments and say something interesting, he’s as happy as a clam.

I love Stuart’s idea about the sidebar widget for the Top 100 Aussie list – how I’d love to put that on my blogs! Kudos to those who spent the time and made the effort to to do this. I appreciate that both Craig and Meg have been doing updates too.

What’s interesting to me as an Australia blogger is that most of the readers of my Acoustic Guitar Blogs are International readers. After discussing blogs with many guitar players in Australia have no idea what I am talking about. My two guitar blogs have around 700 to 800 visitors per day, very few are Australian. The attitude of many people that I have met in Australia is that Blogs are about personal diaries.e.g….”.today I had lunch with my dog, I love eating doughnuts and so does Fluffy” , thias is even common amongst many IT people that I encounter that are not familiar with the online world are are coming from a traditional IT background.

I originally started teaching Blogging in courses because so many people required a web presence but were ‘techically challenged”, the dynamicness and simplicity of blogs were a a great solution.

Tony Hogan

Worlds Best Guitar Blogger