Bloggerati Australia: State of the Nation – Web 2.0 and Australia

I love wanky titles.

Sooooooo, how’s my baby, the site Bloggerati Australia coming along? You need a little update, methinks. First, it’s worked out better than I expected. My primary purpose was personal – to bookmark any and all articles and sites I came across that were Web 2.0 and Australia/New Zealand focussed. I initially was just going to bookmark them in del.icio.us but it seemed clunky.

Plus, my life’s mantra is “Be lazy, have the network do it for you”.

Members: 42
Total Links: 181
Published: 81
Upcoming: 100
Votes: 324
Comments: 11

I’m contribute lots of the links – out of 182 links so far, 141 are mine. but still, that’s 41 I didn’t have to find and evaluate. 😛
324 have been voted on – you don’t have to register to vote – and never the ones I expect. LOL. Who, on God’s green earth, voted for “Canberra plans blogs in 2008“? o.O Although I guess it’s not the content of the article that was important but the fact that the news is out there. *slaps herself* I must remember not to become emotionally involved with the user generated content…

Since I got Google Analytics up and running (July 30th) we’ve had 432 page views and, for the last 10 days or so, are averaging ummm 42 visitors per day. w00t! 😛 In spite of the low visitor numbers, it is rating highly on Google – surprising high. Someone from SEO land will know why. So yes, if you want some of that Google Love, use Bloggerati Australia to link to your sites and blog posts (about Australia and Web 2.0). It’s pretty easy. You copy and paste in the link. Think up 3 or 4 tags, and write a sentence “Good blog post on web 2.0 and Australia” springs to mind. Pick a category and then Submit, Submit (to me!).
Remember, the site is for NEWS – a la Digg. So if you want to see the TOP posts (as above) click on the YEAR button just down a few pixels from the Search box. Strange that Rate the PLATE is in 3rd spot. Sample size is still small I guess.

Pligg is the engine and I don’t recommend it at this point in time. Just in the last month there’s been a couple of new Digg clones, have a look at those. Pligg is locked down and clunky – I had to change the domain name from www. to without cos Javascript stuffs up and also change the .htaccess a gazillion times so that I don’t even remember what I did now. I think I am the only one contributing to their support wiki. Heh. There’s still a line of text that I don’t like when people first register, but the minute they click off and do something they never see it again.

The whole thing cost me about $70 – including hosting – and around 10 hours work. But that’s because I did a TWO day PHP/MySQL course and got overly ambitious. *waves* Hello to Ric Tan btw. He was the poor sucker who got stuck with trying to teach it to me at University of Sydney weekend course.

Forums. Nothing happening here except interesting porn abound (I remove it each day). I’ve had to institute both CAPTCHA and User verification which defeats the purpose of a bridge/unified login from the main site. Talking of porn, why would someone post up a foto of a woman with her breasts cross hatched (you know, hiding them like on the evening news) yet leave his willy in full view? I was going to email them and ask them, but banned ’em instead. Lots of viagra, and things. Oh there was an interesting question asking for Australian bloggers who are nurses. So if you know of any, let me know?

That’s it, my State of the Web2.0 DownUnder Nation round-up. Laurel Papworth, Girl Reporter, signing off. I’ll try and do this on a regular basis, so you can see how a social network about social networks, reporting on social networks grows and succeeds, or fails dismally. heh.