Monday, February 20, 2006

Aussie Bitsers

God, I am hating these posts filled with links to other posts that wannabe-A-list bloggers are starting to post just to keep up their one-post-per-hour minimum. Alex Barnett's is particularly annoying, being merely a repost of his delicious links: every single one of these ones is either about attention, RSS or RSS and attention. Doesn't Alex get sick of the word "attention"? He'd just about have the pixels for the word burned into his retinas in 10 point Verdana by now. He asked if the delicious reposts were annoying: yes Alex, they are.

Having said that, there are a few bits of Australian news I've seen today which don't quite deserve their own posts but should be noted in short.

First, Sydneyite Nik Cubrilovic is filling in at TechCrunch while Mike Arrington goes on holiday. This is a wonderful opportunity for Nik to put an uniquely Australian stamp on TechCrunch, which I hope will involve bagging out Kiwi father figures, putting arrogant Yanks in their place and giving those bloody Poms a bit of what for. I'd love to know what sites he's going to review. Good luck Nik!

Second, Mike Walsh of the Sydney barracks of the News Corporation global hegemony has apparently involved Ben Barren of gnoos in an unnamed project. I know Mike from the first Internet boom, when I was writing for Internet World Australia - a Mecklermedia licenced magazine, back when Alan Meckler was one of the big online news moguls with internet.com as the flagship - and Mike was the inaugural point man for australia.internet.com, for which I and my colleagues provided content for a while. I remember him as a raw-faced kid with a flat-top buzzcut and a hunger for dealmaking, a far cry from the 2006 version intense urban sophisticate with a hairstyle out of GQ. I bet he's still got that hunger though ;) . I wish Ben and Mike luck in whatever it is they're doing - but Ben, make sure Rupert's cheque has a biiiiig number and six zeros after it. In US dollars.

Third and finally, Phil Sim is testing the waters to make Squash a multi-author blog. Phil keeps odd hours with his blog, starting his weekday posting run well after midnight, having spent much of the day on his main gig running MediaConnect. I get the feeling he went too hard too early, and this is a bit of an overreaction. Maybe he should ask Ben to recommend some Aussie blog voices to complement his own. Or maybe he should take a week off and reprioritise. If you're posting just to get ranking on some aggregator, you're not blogging any more. You're spamming. The prime reason for blogging is to disseminate your thoughts. There is such a thing as blogging too much. You have to give your own thoughts time to coalesce into coherency in your own head. That only comes through reading, thinking and then posting.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What the hell does "bagging out" mean?!

And I take it this means you don't like my 'Read/WriteWeb Filter'? Fine, point taken.

Richard

6:54 am, February 20, 2006  
Blogger Paul Montgomery said...

You're not a wannabe-A-lister Richard, you're the real deal. Even if you are a Kiwi who doesn't know "bagging out" means critiquing. :P

And insultboy, it was funny when Douglas Adams did it twenty years ago. You, sir, are no Douglas Adams.

4:01 pm, February 20, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Three guesses on what the secret News Ltd project is.

News Ltd have just launched TrueLocal, a new Australian online search directory that is almost identical to Sensis YellowPages.com.au. Like yellowpages.com.au Truelocal has no web 2.0 features.

My bet is that Ben Barren is consulting to News Ltd on how to add some web 2.0 goodness to Truelocal.com.au

Good luck changing their thinking Ben.

4:15 pm, February 20, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, critiquing! :-) Well yes, that's absolutely fine to do that. Constructive criticism I can take, indeed I encourage it. I'm sensitive, but not *that* sensitive :-) I guess "bagging out" is an aussie term, because I'd never heard of it before this.

ps what have you got against Supricilious?

6:03 am, February 21, 2006  
Blogger Paul Montgomery said...

I like introducing local patois to confuse non-Aussies.

As for Supr.c.ilio.us, I enjoy baiting the baiters. It's fun to see if they can cop what they dish out. I'm like a toecutter for the snark industry.

6:08 am, February 21, 2006  

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