Billy Thorpe Dies Aged 60

Sad news today that rocker Billy (“Thorpie”) Thorpe has died in Sydney from a heart attack at the age of 60.

I remember reading his books about ten years ago – from memory “Most People I Know” and “Sex, Thugs and Rock and Roll”, and found them most entertaining.

We’re in the process of creating a tribute page on Obits, to display messages of condolence for Billy. This is sure to be popular as it was with Belinda Emmett (we received nearly 1,000 tributes).

Messages can be left via Billy’s notice.

dLook Business Directory Reinstates Free Advertising

Due to popular demand, dLook today has reinstated free business directory listings for Australian businesses.

So if you currently operate a business in Australia, mosey on over to our sign up page and if you decide that a premium listing isn’t for you, you can click the drop down box, select “free listing”, and add your basic business details for free.

What a great way to get free advertising for your Australian business.

Yahoo!Xtra – Yahoo Search Marketing in New Zealand

I just got an email from Yahoo! Search Marketing saying:

Dear Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser

Yahoo! Search Marketing is excited to inform you that we will be offering advertisers the opportunity to display their ads in Yahoo!Xtra’s search results in New Zealand.

Yahoo!Xtra is a joint venture between Yahoo!7 and Telecom New Zealand, and will provide an enhanced suite of online content and application services for New Zealanders including search. This new distribution partner provides you with a great opportunity to expand the reach of your advertising.

As Yahoo!Xtra will launch in March 2007, we want to give you the choice of whether or not your ads will appear on Yahoo!Xtra. Here are your choices and what to do:

If you want your current ads to appear on Yahoo!Xtra in New Zealand
You don’t need to do anything. Your existing ads will appear in Yahoo!Xtra’s search results just as they do across the rest of the Yahoo! Search Marketing distribution network.

If you DO NOT want your ads to appear on Yahoo!Xtra in New Zealand
1. Simply email us today at [email address removed]
2. Include your account ID in the subject line
3. Your account will stay the same, and your ads will not be displayed on Yahoo!Xtra in New Zealand

Note: if you don’t want your ads to be shown then you need to send an email.

Running two websites highly targeted to Australia, I don’t want my ads showing in New Zealand (no offense, they just aren’t relevant to that market).

BAS Time

I’m really cranky with myself. EVERY time, I tell myself I’ll be more organised, stay on top of things.

But no – BAS deadline is Wednesday. I’ve got 4 to do. Wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t fallen behind on the bookkeeping. And I misplaced a statement from four months ago, which kind of makes reconciliation hard…

And to top it off I’ve had a filthy cold since Friday. Sniff. Feeling sorry for myself.

Ah to be rich enough to hire a bookkeeper.

Australian Online Revenue – the Results

Cameron Reilly had a brief mention of an article in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review by Foad Fadaghi. The full article (update: now requires payment) can be referenced at the Australian online issue of the BRW magazine and is an incredibly in-depth analysis of online advertising in Australia. Some points from the article are below.

Continued – Australian Online Revenue – the Results

Desperately Seeking Venture Capital

An interesting article by Ben Woodhead at Australian IT today entitled Funds Find $150m for Local Talent. An exerpt from the article;

TECHNOLOGY venture capitalists are gearing up to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh funding as they chase investment opportunities in Australia’s growing pool of entrepreneurial talent.

Venture firms are looking to open new funds worth as much as $150 million and are eyeing off targets across many sectors, including internet plays that are often referred to by the catch-all Web 2.0 tag.

US investment managers eager to prove their worth are also showing an interest in local companies, and expat Australians with experience in international markets are adding to the ranks of savvy entrepreneurs.

Australian venture capitalists that plan to open new funds over the next 12 to 18 months include Technology Venture Partners (TVP), Divergent Capital, Starfish Ventures and Kestrel Capital (formerly Nanyang Ventures).

They hope to raise up to $330 million between them.

The article also talks about “web 2.0″.

This is great news for Australian Internet Startups.

How to Remove a Site you “Author” on Mybloglog

It seems some unscrupulous operators are adding unsuspecting authors to their communities on mybloglog – presumably to boost exposure for their blogs.

If you find you are suddenly authoring a site that you don’t in fact author here’s what you do.

1. Go to “my home”

2. Click on Edit Settings in the site you want to remove

3. Scroll down until you see the heading “Remove Site/Blog from My Profile”

4. Click the Remove Site/Blog button

I think this (and yesterday’s debacle) highlights the need to put some counter measures in place (like a confirmation email sent to the new author).

Update: Mybloglog’s blog is reporting this issue as being fixed – but any links out there are still effective – so DON’T click on them.

Update 2: Please read MyBlogLog’s Blog.

Something Fishy on Mybloglog “Blogmemes Belgium”

This is very unusual. Listed on the hot communities on is a community that was titled “Blogmemes Belgium“. It has 145 unsuspecting members and what looked to be more authors than members.

As I was scratching my head over the number of authors, the “screenshot” changed, as did the community title to “Blog f*%k Belge”.

WTF! Glad I didn’t join that one. Screen shot below

Update: The name has now been changed (back?) to “Progressive House“- how bizarre.

Perkonis sheds a bit more light….

Update: Please read MyBlogLog’s Blog for an update on how they have fixed this issue.

Buggerall – Australian Blogs’ Craigslist

In a recent post about Australian blog hosts and blog search, I mentioned Australianblogs which was redirecting to Buggerall.

Well, Buggerall have released their latest concept in Australian community search – a place where users can add not only blogs and websites, but an assortment of classifieds notices, such as an event, personals, for sale, jobs etc. Listings are created with a spot for a description, URL and item and location tags. These tags are the means by which items are searched.

Note the heading “Welcome to BuggerAll.com.au – the AustralianBlogs’ craigslist”.

One thing concerns me regarding the functionality of the site. Whilst users need to enter an email address when adding a listing, there is no registration required. This is both a positive (from a user perspective), but also a negative. It opens up the potential for malicious entries e.g. “for a good time phone…. (insert ex-girlfriend’s number)”, not to mention listings for XXX rated sites.

Not requiring to sign in means that once submitted you loose control over the listing (i.e. it doesn’t appear that you can easily edit or delete a listing), so once you’ve found a new flatmate, or the perfect employee, how do you cancel the ad? It could lead to stale listings and an administrative nightmare for the website owners…

I do like the concept, just think there’s a few issues that need to be sorted.

Blogarate – an Australian Startup

I read with interest that Clarke Scott has recently released another website called Blogarate.com, which allows visitors to rate your blog posts. As the blogging community is buzzing about how Yahoo! ripped off Digg, this service quietly appears as another voting alternative, albeit with a difference.

Blogarate is groovy in a couple of ways. Firstly, it lets you give the “thumbs up” (or down) to a post really quickly without needing to leave a comment, and it has that sense of community a bit like mybloglog that says “I was here”. Actually, Andy Beard much more eloquently refers to it as “Social Proof“. Proof that real people actually visit your blog, and proof that real people (not 12 year old kids) have a say in whether this is a good blog post.

Blogarate is a free service, you create an account (which takes about 15 seconds), grab some code and you’re away…. Well, it should be that simple assuming one has admin rights to one’s blog, which I don’t here The best I can do is add a banner on my sidebar which links to my Blogarate profile. But, this is a widget I would REALLY like to have, and I do imagine it could become very popular.

Maybe I was having a blonde moment, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to vote! I couldn’t find anything in the FAQ’s to help. In the end I thought, maybe if I click on the stars that will take me to where I vote – Oops! That was my vote (and I think I only gave it a 3 – sorry Clarke!). But NOW I know – you click the corresponding number of stars to give it that vote – doh!

From Blogarate’s “about” page:

Blogarate.com is a free service that lets readers of your blog rate your blog posts and displays the last 5 readers to rate your post (see the image below).

The widget also sends that blog post data via the magic of Ajax to blogarate.com for processing. The data collected includes blog post Url, title, author, tags and the rating. We process the data and display it for users to find related blog posts and news items.

Blogarate.com is not just a blog post rating system, it is a distributed news aggregation platform.

By collecting blog post details including rankings at the source Blogarate reflects in greater detail what is making news on the web and what blog readers see is important.

This is another great Aussie service, brought to you by the creator of Whooiz.com.