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Top Australian Blogs

Posted By Darren Rowse 18th of April 2007 Pro Blogging News 0 Comments

One of the questions that I’m asked on a semi-regular basis from Australian friends, journalists and others is for a list of top Australian Blogs. While there have been attempts at such lists in the past and even competitions to find Australia’s ‘best blog’ on numerous occasions they’ve generally been popularity competitions (not that there’s anything wrong with being popular).

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a number of emails from Australian bloggers telling me of a couple of attempts to get a good list of top Australian blogs.

The first was one compiled using Technorati’s rankings list at Craig Harper. His list is in his blog’s sidebar and is going to be updated regularly.

The other list builds on Craig’s one and is compiled by Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond. Meg’s Top 100 takes into account Technorati’s ranking but also Alexa’s global and Australian rankings.

While both lists (and their methodology) can be refined (and Meg’s asking for feedback on hers) what excites me about them is that surfing the list helped me find some great new blogs that I wasn’t previously aware of. I’m also pretty happy to see that featuring prominently in the list is a number of blogs that I’m a daily reader of – bloggers writing about new media like Yaro Starak, Alister Cameron, Duncan Riley, Meg herself, Ben Barren, Trevor Cook, Des Walsh, Shai Coggins and more.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Hi Darren

    Many thanks for your post about the index.

    It’s definitely a work in progress, and I’ve already had some great input. I’m also getting some help on automating the updating process as we speak (more about that later), but that’s certainly going to take a lot of the “grunt work” out of updating the list.

    As you mention, it’s not an easy job identifying all the Aussie blogs out there, so to your Aussie audience – please DON’T be shy about sticking your hand up. If I can get the process automated, then there’s no reason why we can’t get a “top 200” list, or more, going….

    Thanks for your support :)

  2. 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

  3. As usual, Darren’s humility is amazing. He has forgotten to mention that he has three of the blogs listed in the ‘Ultimate Aussie Blogroll Top 100’.Problogger at #1 (of course) with a Technorati
    Ranking of 59 (out of 71,000,000)
    Digital Photography
    School
    with a Technorati Ranking of 1281, and
    LivingRoom >> A space for Life with a Technorati Ranking of 6764.
    Congratulations Darren! The blogosphere is a better place with you in it.
    Congratulations also to Meg for your ongoing research and commitment to Aussie blogs.
    Craig Harper – keep us up to
    date with your Technorati blog rankings.

  4. 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!!

  5. It looks like Australia breeds some pretty good blogger. I read quite a few blogs by Australians like entrepreneur-journey etc. You must be pretty good writers

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

    Mouahahaha!!!

  7. Giving Australia Some Love! My wife is Australian and I get the priviledge of visiting a lot (and even lived in Sydney for two years). I do promote a lot of money making products and a lot of the emails that I received are from Aussies and Kiwis. Australians are becoming a very big part of the internet economy and for those of you questioning whether it is worth your time or not, let me tell you right now: it is! cheers…matt

  8. 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.

  9. Hi Guys had a very quick look at the list last night, and found it absolutely fascinating. The variety of offerings was incredibIe, and somewhat mind boggling! One guesses, that, with the development of and the proliferation of easy to use open source blogging platforms like wordpress, this process will hopefully accelerate.

    Which all in all bodes well for our country and its vibrancy. Go the Aussie Blogger. I have just started blogging in a very well trodden sector..hahaha
    where the space is somewhat crowded…but hey such is life…Fun….

  10. 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 :)

  11. Aussie Aussie Aussie…

    Now try and compile one of these lists for Americans – that would be a competitive list!

  12. Cheers for the heads up Darren.

    Great list Meg.

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

  13. Hey I just found out that Lifehack.org is also written by an Australian, that’s a pretty big blog …

  14. 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.

  15. Geographical blog lists are interesting I think. I’ve used the blog aggregator for my province as a jumping off point to arrange blogger meetups and potluck Barbecues. The Saskblogs Aggregator tries to add as many active Saskatchewan blogs as possible, and doesn’t consider the Technorati rankings, so the high rated smalldeadanimals.com is on an equal footing with anyone else just getting started in the list.

  16. 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.

  17. Just wanting to let you know about our blogsite — superconnect’s blog. We have just got started in telling our marketplace about what we offer and how we do it.

  18. 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

  19. I didn’t realize that my blog is on rank #11 on Meg’s top 100 Australian blogs list (which has moved to http://blogpond.com.au/top-100-australian-blogs-index/ by the way) until a visitor told me

    Hopefully one day I can be included in the Top 10 but surely I won’t be able to defeat you, Darren :)

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