Merlin Mann on the ingredients that make for a good blog, which includes a dose of good old fashioned obsession: People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can't stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person's obsessions ... Read full entry

Laurel Papworth has extracted the names of Australian bloggers from the latest AdAge Power150 index, which ranks the world's top media and marketing blogs, to form a list of influential Australian bloggers. A few points of interest... BannerBlog, which I profiled at OnVoiceOver a while back, is number two on the Australian list, and Duncan Macleod's Duncan's TV Ad Land, also near the top of ... Read full entry

"Net Newsers", people who are typically under 35, university graduates, and well off, are redefining media habits in the US, by shunning traditional news services, such as newspaper and TV news broadcasts, in favour of sourcing news and information from blogs and online news websites. The biennial Pew Research Center report on changing news audiences described 13% of the US public as "net newsers" - web users under 35 ... Read full entry

I've mentioned Australian INfront founder, and web designer about Sydney, Justin Fox's latest personal blog before, but in a blogosphere choke full of make-money-online and blogs-about-blogging ... blogs, it is refreshing to read something again that is the no-strings-attached real deal. I feel like I've been sitting here all these years watching the world go by, in my "only dead fish go with the flow" sort of way, while ... Read full entry

Ten ways to go about encouraging more meaningful comments left in response to newspaper articles online. Derek Powazek has given the matter quite some thought. If you think bad comments bug you, they bug the good commenters twice as much. Yes, you should be paying someone on staff to be the Community Manager. In addition, you can also enable the community to help. Give every post a "This is ... Read full entry

Another point-of-view in the ongoing newspapers verses blogs as a source of trustworthy information debate: If online news services want to match the quality and depth of their print counterparts, they will need to hire, quite possibly, the very journalists working for the aforementioned newspapers. If online viewers want the level of news and opinion that print reporters generate, the Internet news services will hire reporters, defraying the cost out ... Read full entry

If you are quoting from a blog or forum post (as I do frequently) do you, or should you, correct spelling and grammar errors? If the "error" was such that it significantly altered the context of the excerpt, then maybe I would. (And hope it wasn't noticed?) Would you contact the person who made the comments and get their ok to edit their words? Interesting question. Take a passage signed ... Read full entry

I'm been quite enjoying my digital mashup experience here this last half year until I read about the latter day futility of link blogs... oh well. And with a million people all madly curating the web - in many cases, trying to put your link in their curational record before someone else does - getting linked up isn't exactly hard any more. These aren't the days of begging for ... Read full entry

One of Australia's largest retail banks, NAB has taken to leaving spam comments on blogs as part of a targeted promotion for a new product, according to an article published at Crikey today. The bank apparently thought they'd "give it a try" as "blogs are a public forum", and believed that blog moderators would delete any comments they felt were inappropriate. Another way of saying they didn't contact ... Read full entry

Julian Cole launches an index of the Top 50 Australian Marketing Pioneer Blogs, with a long time favourite of mine BannerBlog at number one. The list will be updated quarterly. I realised after nearly 2 years of blogging, I really didn't have any idea of who was blogging around the topic of Marketing in Australia. I decided to make this list in order to shed light on the Australian ... Read full entry