The Australian Blogosphere’s #1 Meeting Place
I’ve been doing that Scouta-a-a-a-a-a thing to Richard Giles for the last two weeks of Scouta’s demo. It’s gone terribly well and all concerned have been very impressed.
Like Molly said, do yourself a favour and get in touch with Richard for a ticket to ride.
About The Author:
Clarke Scott, home-grown internet entrepreneur has been hard at work on Whooiz.com, a rapidly growing international website that…oops I shouldn’t get ahead of the interview below:
1. Â Â Â Â Clarke, what is WHOOIZ? Whooiz.com is a People, Podcast and Blog discovery service with Social networking widgets.
2. Â Â Â Â Who are you targetting?Bloggers and podcasts mainly but, I am just about to move into the Myspace area and so I can see more and more comedians and a like getting involved.
3. Â Â Â Â Tell us about how you conceived the idea behind Whooiz.The idea has morphed considerably from the original idea of a Wikipedia for people into more of a social networking/widget site.
4. Â Â Â Â I see you’ve had a great take-up by some high profile bloggers, what sort of feedback have you received?The feedback has been awesome! We had our first 500,000+ pageview day last Friday and so I am already thinking about upgrading the server and or
Adding more of them just to keep up with the growth.
5. Â Â Â Â What’s been the easiest (and conversely, the hardest) thing about launching Whooiz?Easiest thing: Convincing people to signup. Hardest thing: Predicting the rate of growth and therefore the server configuration.
6.     Can you tell us a bit about yourself, Clarke? How did you find yourself on the path of the internet entrepreneur? I’m a software architect and a keen interest in startups. I love the creative aspect of coming up with an idea, building it And seeing it mature into a popular product/site.
7. Â Â Â Â What are your plans for Whooiz? I would like Whooiz.com to be the one place n the internet for people for find other people, blogs and podcasts. Also to have a Whooiz.com build widget on every blog and podcast website.
8.     What do you see as the greatest challenges for Whooiz over the next 12 months? Finding time to implement every idea I’ve had or widget idea I’ve come up with in the past couple of months.
Hey great stuff, Clarke. For those that don’t know, this is not Clarke’s first web venture. Just check out his Whooiz profile…
About The Author:
Sara (aka the Bargain Queen), is my fabulous assistant organiser (who incidentally is featured in Take5 magazine) for the Sydney weblogger meetup and was kind enough to give me a reminder prod:
Dear fellow bloggers
You are receiving this email because your entry in the Australian Blogs database indicated you are Sydney-based blogger who has asked to be kept informed of developments in the blogging community.
Hope that 2007 is off to a good start for you. Like me, you may have a feeling that this will be the year blogging really takes off in Australia. In November 2006, veteran Australian blogger Tim Dunlop (creator of The Road to Surfdom) was recruited by News Ltd. to write for their new big-budget title ‘Blogocracy’. Who knows - could you be next?
With this in mind, I thought you might like to come along to a social meeting of Sydney pro-bloggers, hobbyist bloggers (and their fans) on Thursday evening (18th) at Paddy Maguire’s in Haymarket at 7pm. The details of the meetup and the RSVP list are here: http://blog.meetup.com/371/calendar/5286606/ Â
You may find this to be a good opportunity to mix in an informal setting, and to meet others who share your blogging endeavours.
Hope you can make it, and look forward to meeting you there.
Best wishes
Sara Goldstein
The Bargain Queen
http://www.bargainqueen.org
thebargainqueen@gmail.com
About The Author:
Just a quick heads-up that the first Virtual Weblogger meetup is on this Wed@8pm AEDST (6pm for those on the west coast, like myself).
Just pop into AustralianBlogs chat, get yourself signed-up and either hang around in the lobby OR feel free to create a little private space for those quiet one-on-ones.
There’s no set agenda, just come and go as you please but please pop me an email to let me know what you think (or just blog about it and I’ll pick it up anyway 
)
See you then!
About The Author:
If you’ve had some recent troubles with feeds from either News2.com.au, or AustralianPodcasts.com.au, then it’s because we done some work in splitting up the pair of sites from the BuggerAll.com.au master site.
Thanks to Roland for the advice. Apart from the additional internet real estate, he says the search engines will look after me.
About The Author:
Last month I was fortunate enough to host the inaugural Sydney weblogger meetup, where I got to meet Sisi, Petra, Ian and John. I missed out on meeting Sara and Emma, who were at the same pub but didn’t find the rest of us. Therein lies the problem of meetups:
In a meetup group still in its infancy (though 30-strong), we had 20 RSVPs but only seven actual attendees that we know of (though I caught up with the very affable Steven Noble, who sent his apologies beforehand, for a pleasant coffee that morning).
It got me thinking that perhaps we could complement the face-to-face meetups with a virtual one, i.e. via a chatroom-style approach hosted by AustralianBlogs where users can do the meet-and-greet but also break out into user-created rooms for some private chit chat (where appropriate).
Let’s set an informal virtual meetup on AustralianBlogs Chat on the second Wednesday of every month starting on the 10th of January 2007. From 8pm AEDST till late. Users can come and go as they please.
Feel free to pop in anytime to roadtest the chatroom, you’ll probably find me in there still testing it out and ironing out bugs.
See you all 10th of Jan 2007@8pm and every second Wed of the month thereafter (all Australian bloggers welcome regardless of state/territory, incidentally…) Love to hear any feedback.
About The Author:
Congrats to Richard Giles. Look forward to the launch, mate.
About The Author:
Have been terribly distracted of late but am now back on the case and rolling out some enhancements that have been sitting in TEST:
(image - the jacaranda tree in my front lawn, earlier this week)
About The Author:
For those in the vicinity, please drop by the Sydney Webloggers meetup on November 23rd.
I’m looking forward to meeting face-to-face some of the bloggers that I’ve been swapping emails and IMs with. Please call me on the mobile if you’re lost or would like to meetup beforehand (Thanks Steve - looking forward to our coffee).
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After having a look at the fantastic Livehouse (see previous post), I kicked around the idea of a free local bloghosting service. The appeal of having a complementary website to AustralianBlogs and News2.0 proved to great so….
Ta da….the AustralianBlogs team is proud to present weblogger.com.au (beta).
Kay ‘The Goatlady’ Smoljak and trusty Starfish sidekick Anton are working furiously on the final design which we hope to launch in the new year.
Thanks to Simone for roadtesting and the terrific support.
About The Author:
Recently, I’ve been in touch with Francis from Livehouse, a fine Australian blog hosting service. He’s been kind enough to show me around the features. Great work, Francis! For all those contemplating starting a blog or even switching providers, please pop over to Livehouse and check it out for yourself.
AustralianBlogs is keen to support the local blog services industry. Local content for local audiences.
About The Author:
Thanks to Kay (half-goatlady, half-starfish) Smoljak, we are officially going toe-to-toe with comedy legend, Kevin “Bloody” Wilson on August 18th, 2006 (along with WA All Sports expo and magazine) in the ‘Media’ category of the WA Web Awards 2006.
Kay will be the sole representative of the team on the night as I am no longer able to fit into my low-cut, little black number.
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UPDATE: After our initial public beta, we’ve gone back to the drawing board. Thanks very much to all that contributed their time and provided feedback.
We hope to have the new site up and running very soon!
About The Author:
I received a nice email from the Aussie founders of Zookoda, Nick and Yorke a few weeks ago inviting us to a testdrive. After dusting off the RSS feeds for News2.0, I did indeed do just that. A simple-to-follow dashboard and I was up and running in minutes. Great to see local talent taking it head-on.
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Yoiks! How did we ever get by with that other layout? Thanks to Joe Stella for pointing that out
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(For Martine at Frangipani…I’m working on less whitespace)
Behold. The News2.0 sidebar link images. This one’s my personal fav.
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Want to monitor the AustralianBlogs-osphere from the comfort of your own aggregator?
Just follow the bouncing feed icon…
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The 24 hour tagcloud a day after the 2-2 draw against Croatia (appropriately sprinkled with Brazil, Croatia, Italy and all things Socceroo/World Cup).
About The Author:
I have been thinking about what Cameron Reilly had said to me re the News2.0 opt-out option for blogs listed on AustralianBlogs.com.au - ie. how do we address concerns re copyright abuse?
News2.0 is about showcasing local content. It’s meant to drive traffic back towards the original blog. So it makes sense that we should not be replicating blog post content verbatim. Even if the blogger uses full RSS feeds, I think it would work better if we truncated the blog posts shown on News2.0 - all roads should point back to the original blog post and thus the original blog.
To this end, we have added some code to truncate content after 600 characters. I hope this is enough to whet the appetite of the blog lurker so as to induce a clickthrough to the original blog post.
UPDATE: Just cleaning up some rogue
About The Author:
I don’t have a personal blog so here’s my first rant.
As I go through my very comfortable life in a first world country, and I stress about:
I just finished watching ‘Seoul Train‘ on SBS.
Enough said.
Blogs for positive change.
Highlight. Lobby. Change.
And while I’m at it, The Hope Orhanage. Get up.
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