Public service announcement, since there have been a few search engine queries in here in the last week or so… Justin Fox has moved his lost-for-awhile-there personal blog SPAMVENTDOCUMENT to WordPress, with its own dot com domain name to boot.

Ok, back to the cars everyone :)

Is blogging in decline? It depends. People, or groups, who were using blogs as a way of building profile, or promoting a cause, are finding the services of say Facebook or Twitter better suit their purposes, whereas blogs are increasingly seen as repositories of specialised, and in-depth, information.

The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing. Mr Kelly’s research shows that blogs tend to be linked within languages and countries, with each language-group in turn containing smaller pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions. Even narrower specialisations emerge around more personal topics that benefit from public advice.

Unbelievable. It’s not the quality, or tone, of articles that a blogger writes, but rather their quantity, that has the greater effect on a blogger’s overall popularity.

She found that the more words a blogger posted, the more friends they had and the higher their attractiveness rating. The tone of their posts – whether they contained mostly positive or negative comments – had no effect. The findings were presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference this week.

This is the news I’ve been waiting for…

A list of 50 of the world’s best design blogs put together by Times Online writer Lynne Robinson.

A list of some of Australia’s best design sites compiled by Australian Edge.

The Australian INfront is conspicuous by absence from this collection.

I’ve never bought into the argument that a blog must offer a commenting facility in order to be considered a blog, it’s something that is down to the author of the blog, and like anything it’s different strokes for different folks:

Some people do better in collaborative, challenging environments. Others prefer to work in peace and solitude. Some writers and directors read reviews of their work, others don’t. There’s likely no rational answer to the question of whether comments on the Internet are a good thing or not.

Armin comes down hard on pointless and abusive comments, and good on him.

Like any person who runs a blog, I enjoy seeing the comment counts rise to 50, 70, 100 and more, but the truth is that no more than a quarter of those comments are worth reading. The main trend in comments is to say “this sucks” or some other alternative mode of pithy, ruthless offense. This stops now. Unless you have a substantiated and thoughtful response to why something, in your mind, “sucks” please do not comment at all. From now on all comments along the lines of “fail,” “this looks like student work,” or “the designer should be fired,” will be deleted at my own discretion without notification or explanation.

I was discussing this with a blog associate in London who felt his problem though was more to do with people not reading posts they are commenting on properly. Well I can tell some stories there. I once wrote about a technical issue I had experienced, and how I had resolved it.

This however was apparently lost on a couple of commenters who suggested a solution to the problem I’d encountered… even though I’d included the exact same solution in the very post!

Following on from last week’s mention of Australia’s Top 30 food blogs, now check out 50 of the world’s best food blogs

Possibly an Unbook could be thought of as a blog that also appears in print.

An unbook is released in versions. As in open source software, version 1.0 of an unbook is a significant milestone, indicating that it is stable and reliable enough for use by the general public. The significance of a new release is indicated by the size of the gap: For example, the difference between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is major.

Sydney Food and photo blogger Jennifer Lam has compiled a list of Australia’s Top 30 food blogs.

I’m still not sure whether these blogs are best visited before eating or after…