Spotify listeners shun Australian music says Wrapped 2025

5 December 2025

The suggestion, made by The Daily Aus (TDA), is that few Australians listened to local music in 2025. On Spotify at least.

Zero local acts featured in Australia’s most listened-to artists, tracks, and albums on Spotify in 2025.

You’ll have to go to Instagram (IG) to read the slide card since TDA mainly publish their news reporting on IG, because their target audience, mainly Generation Z and some Millennials, consume news and current affairs reporting on the socials.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the world needs more niche blogs, and TDA, with their fine writing would slot nicely into news and current affairs niche. They do republish articles to their website, but sadly there is no RSS feed to subscribe to.

But back to the headline. I checked my 2025 Spotify Wrapped, and found Moon Motion, by Brisbane based Australian act First Beige (er, Instagram page), was my second most listened to track this year.

Tame Impala, Peking Duk, RÜFÜS DU SOL, and Vera Blue, are among Australian acts on my liked songs playlist. I can’t be the only person in Australia with local acts on their playlist.

It seems surprising to me that not one floated to the top, or at least near it, on the overall most-listened to lists. But maybe it’s some sort of Spotify quirk, and maybe next year we won’t be talking so much about them.

I also learned I have a music listening age of twenty-two (thank-you Spotify), why then all this talk about niche-blogs and RSS feeds? At my “age” I’m meant to be all in the socials.

Universe to astronomers: I am stranger than you imagine

4 December 2025

Kurzgesagt making sense of a non-sensical universe:

For decades, we’ve had a beautiful theory of the cosmos. One that explained how the universe began, what it’s made of, and how it’s supposed to behave. It matched our observations astonishingly well and made us feel like we’d almost deciphered the cosmic code. But in the last few years, as our telescopes got better and our data sharper, cracks started to appear. Strange mismatches between what the theory predicted and what we actually saw.

British astronomer Arthur Eddington wrote in a book published in 1927, saying: “not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” He was riffing on the words of compatriot scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote, also in 1927: “now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Stranger. Queerer. Take your pick.

These people nailed the nature of the universe one hundred years ago, with a fraction of the knowledge we have today. And what we know now will likely only represent a mere fraction what we’ll know in another one-hundred years. I think it’s a little too soon to say we’ve figured out the universe.

RELATED CONTENT

astronomy, physics, science

Neocities, Nekoweb, bringing back the weird personal websites

4 December 2025

Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites.

With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a substantial contribution. Nekoweb was founded last year, but has a growing membership.

Their goals are similar however, says Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

Across both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like anti-AI webrings, a personal website in the style of the ’90s but themed around a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).

Bad design trends: hotel rooms without bathroom doors

2 December 2025

Bring Back Doors. A hopefully growing list of hotels where there are doors to the room’s bathroom.

I’ve emailed hundreds of hotels and I asked them two things: do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass? Everyone that says yes to their doors closing, and no to being made of glass has been sorted by price range and city for you to easily find places to stay that are guaranteed to have a bathroom door.

I’m trying to think how this — hotel rooms without bathroom doors — became a thing.

Did an architect stay at the once sole establishment in the world that did not have bathroom doors in the room, and thought: now there’s an idea, I must incorporate it into my future hotel room designs.

One thing led to another, and suddenly bathrooms sans doors were a trend. A terrible trend.

RELATED CONTENT

design, travel, trends

Sally Rooney books may be withdrawn from sale in UK bookshops

2 December 2025

The Irish author, whose titles include Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends, wants United Kingdom royalties from her novels, and any screen adaptations made there, to go to Palestine Action, a British pro-Palestinian organisation.

The British government however considers Palestine Action to be a terrorist group, and banned them earlier this year.

In sending Rooney royalty payments, her UK publishers, and the BBC, who co-produced the 2020 TV adaptation of Normal People, Rooney’s second novel, would be breaking terrorism laws. The author says this could result in her novels being withdrawn from sale in the UK.

Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog

1 December 2025

Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website:

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

Presumably, if someone writes a comment, that is actually a post on their blog, in reply to something I’ve written here, I’m notified in some way. Further, I can then allow that comment/blog post to appear as a comment on my website, if I so decide. But there’s nothing new about writing responses to another person’s blog post, on your own blog.

Once upon a time, the only way to “comment” publicly on someone else’s blog post, or rather, an online journal entry, as they were once called, was to write a post on your website in response. This is because early blogs didn’t have commenting facilities. Back then, the tool closest to permitting any sort of on-site public interaction between website writers and visitors, were guestbooks.

But guestbooks — intended really only to allow visitors to leave brief, and usually complimentary messages — were hardly an appropriate forum for discussing blog posts, particularly if these conversations were in-depth and involved numerous participants. But unless a visitor told the writer about their post-in-response, just about the only way a writer might find out was through their referrer logs.

But writing blog posts as comments is a practice that has somewhat been revived by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community. A blogger might respond to this post, on their website, using the title “Re: Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog”. They might also send a pingback, a webmention, or an email, advising me of their blog post.

Being able to reply to blog posts with comments though made for a convenient way to host a centralised discussion about an article, rather than having fragments of it scattered across the web. Centralisation can have some benefits. Readers no longer needed a website to respond to a blog post, and often only had to supply an email address, whether real or not, to air their thoughts.

And so the discussion flowed.

But we all know what happened next. Free-for-all commenting was a boon for spammers. Winer’s blog discourse system would create a hurdle for spammers, who likely would not have a website they could post comments to. Of course, serious comment spammers could setup a blog to publish their spam to, but perhaps the discourse system will have a way for dealing with that.

The blog discourse system also addresses another matter few people give much thought to: comment, and by definition content, ownership. Who “owns” a comment I leave on someone else’s blog? Me, or the website owner? If I append my name, I am identified as the writer — am I not? — and intellectual rights and what not, are mine, even though the publication is not.

Most likely that is the case. Perhaps though, somehow, someone with the same name as me, might claim the comment as theirs, particularly if they see some value in it. I don’t know how often that sort of thing happens, if at all, probably never, or incredibly rarely. But if my comments in reply to other people’s posts are published at my website, and then “syndicated” as an approved comment, the possibility of ownership conflict is removed.

What I wonder about though, is where do the comments I write, which are a response to a post on another person’s blog, end up on my website? Will these be funnelled into a separate content stream? I’m not sure I like the idea of comments intended for other blogs, featuring on the main feed of my blog, amongst my regular posts, even if I did compose the comments.

And will differing content management systems be able to talk each other? For instance will a comment-post made on a WordPress blog, post seamlessly onto, say, a Ghost blog? What of bona fide commenters who do not have blogs? Questions remain to be answered then. But I’m looking forward to finding out more about Winer’s discourse system, and seeing it in action.

Blogosphere sightings: handwritten content, ceaseless curiosity, and a niche blog

29 November 2025

I started writing about newer blogs and personal websites earlier this year, and then somehow stopped. A busy year at work has been getting in the way of things as ever. Let’s try and get this going again, since there can’t be enough sharing of links within the blogosphere.

Having said my focus was to feature newer websites, I’m opening with one that’s been online since 2015. Ratika Deshpande’s website, Chavanni Class, is inspired by her great grandfather, whom she never met. He died quite sometime before her birth, but he was a teacher whose work, and life, was driven by a seemingly ceaseless curiosity.

Jan Sandstrom has been writing on his “blog style notebook” about life since leaving his job in 2024, to spend more time composing music, writing, creating comics, and painting. Some content is handwritten on paper but is posted with text captions, while posts and newsletters are only published from time to time, on this “quite slow blog”. And why not, what’s the rush anyway?

I don’t know much about the writer behind Iterative Wonders, but the about page tells us they’re “a tech and AI enthusiast, [who’s] brain often feels like a browser with way too many fascinating tabs open.” I’m right there with all the open browser tabs. Only a few posts have been published so far, but there’s still plenty to digest.

And to close, here’s a newer niche style blog. Sam Clemente’s publication, The Digital Renaissance, which explores “the new intersection between technology and liberal arts”, has been online for about a year. Subjects including technology, the social web, and business, are covered. Yes, there are older blogs focused on these topics, but it’s good to see newer outlets coming through.

AI slop named word of 2025 by Macquarie Dictionary

29 November 2025

The Australian dictionary’s word of the year committee were scathing, to say the least, of their pick:

We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop. Slop in this sense will be a robust addition to English for years to come. The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?

I’d hoped Macquarie Dictionary would make IndieWeb their word for 2025. Enshittification, by the way, was the 2024 word of the year.

Linux distribution Zorin OS downloads surge as Windows 10 support ends

27 November 2025

The manufacturers of Zorin OS, a Linux distribution, or operating system (OS), similar to Linux Mint, which I use, claim there have been nearly eight-hundred-thousand downloads from Windows devices in the last month. This approximately coincides with Microsoft effectively ceasing support for their popular Windows 10 OS for many users.

I’m not sure how many devices in the world are running Windows OS’s — a lot/too many — but it is encouraging to see so many people willing to break the Windows’ stranglehold and try something different, given migrating to an unfamiliar OS not always the easiest of steps to take.

RELATED CONTENT

Linux, operating systems, technology

Sam Altman, Jony Ive, tease arrival of their AI device

27 November 2025

Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, they [Altman and Ive] said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it could arrive in “less than” two years.

We only have to wait another two years to see what this is all about. From what I can gather though — albeit as an armchair expert — we might see an AI powered powered device, possibly similar in appearance to a smartphone, but without a screen, that responds only to voice commands.

As to what actually eventuates, only time will tell.

1 2 … 208 NEXT