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Australian Blogs
Earlier this month Jon Yau approached me to see whether I was interested in being a patron for a new project he and his partners were working on. His project is a Web 2.0 social bookmarking site specifically focused on Australian blogs. I was more than happy to lend a hand to a project that supports Aussie blogging so I eagerly said yes.

The site is live now in beta format ready for testing. Jon is working with his team to develop the site, adding new features in response to user feedback. If you are an Aussie blogger or just someone who wants to highlight some good Australian blogs please make use of AustralianBlogs.com.au and then let us know your feedback. The site is ready for your contributions.

AustralianBlogs.com.au
March 2006

WHAT IS IT?

AustralianBlogs.com.au is a free community resource to bookmark your favourite Australian blogs. Similar to del.icio.us (but less invasive - we don’t need you to register or login), you can add your bookmarks or just browse to see what’s popular.

WHY?

It is a place where Australian bloggers can showcase their work, and the blog-reading public can find interesting, relevant and popular Australian blogs.

HOW?

By using some basic Web 2.0 features like tags/folksonomy and community bookmarking, Australian blogs can be categorised easily which makes finding them a whole lot simpler. You don’t even have to sign-up to post a bookmark or browse the website. It’s a community-driven site in its purest form.

PREREQUISITES:

:: It MUST BE about an Australian subject or topic; OR by an Australian; OR have a .au domain name.
:: It MUST BE a blog.
:: *** NO ADULT CONTENT OR SPAM PLEASE! *** (a zero-tolerance approach will be taken)
:: If it passes the above tests, then it’s in!
:: If in doubt, just drop us a line: email@australianblogs.com.au

WHO?

AustralianBlogs.com.au is staffed by a small but dedicated team of volunteers who believe that the Australian blogosphere produces high quality blogs that are just as good, if not better than those available offshore. Local content for local readers.

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As you probably know I’m really into all things Blog Traffic as part of my Blog Traffic King exploits (join my list if you are into blogging) and today I’m participating in the second trial of what is called a “Blog Boost”.

I’m a member of a Yahoo! Group called LinkedIn Bloggers, who’s mission is to:

Linkedin (TM) Bloggers is a unique forum, where members of the Linkedin network (http://www.linkedin.com) meet to discuss how blogging and related technologies, such as podcasting, video blogging (‘vlogging’) and wikis can support their professional networking and self-promotion in the spirit of Linkedin. It is not a technical forum although there are inevitably discussions about technology from time to time.

There are some fairly high profile members including Dave Taylor, Darren Rowse and Des Walsh so I think it’s got great potential as a blogging “think tank”.

The blog boost concept is something we are testing to help increase the exposure of some of the great blogs in the group. The idea here is to firstly create blog awareness and also test the power of a network traffic effect, hence the interest of my alter ego, the Blog Traffic King.

Previous Results

The first blog boost recipient, EMail OverLoaded, had fantastic results from the boost and reported back this rundown of events (summarized by Perceptric):

• 16 bloggers (mainly LinkedIn Bloggers) posted items linking to the blog. These brought an extra 102 visitors
• At some point the blog entered the del.icio.us/popular list, giving an extra 39 visitors.
• The sharp increase in traffic got the blog listed at the bottom of the 10 fastest-growing Wordpress.com blogs. This list is seen by 120,000 Wordpress.com bloggers on their dashboards when they log in. This gave an extra 96 visits, and started it climbing to become #1 on the list.
• Robert Scoble, Wordpress.com’s most famous blogger, must have seen this list on his dashboard and promptly Scobleized the blog. Although he called the blog a “Z-list blogger”, he did have a creative explanation for it
• Being Scobleized caused the numbers to continue to shoot up, getting the blog onto the list of the day’s 10 hottest Wordpress.com blogs (distinct from fastest-growing), that is displayed on Wordpress.com’s front page. It held at #5, and attracted an extra 46 visitors.
• On the second day, traffic started arriving via Lifehack.org and Lifehacker.com, which both posted excerpts of the targets posts, and 43Folders.com which added the blog to their Recent Links list. More people delved deeper into the blog, and commented on the posts.
• Google ranking improved:
  email productivity: was #12 (page 2), now #1 (page 1)
  email overload: was #60 (page 6), now #1 (page 1)
• Google was fast to recognize links and traffic, Technorati was slow: didn’t increase its count of number of blogs that linked to the target.
• A small community of coordinated bloggers acting in unison can set in motion a process that brings a large amount of traffic in a short time. The paradox is that the bulk of the traffic does not come from these blogs — it’s due to the threshold effect
• Once you exceed the threshold necessary to become listed on a popular “top 10″ list, the rate of acceleration increases significantly, getting more traffic with less effort.
• 700 extra visitors generated 1000extra page views, which means that the majority of these opportunistic visitors landed on the site, but did not click on any internal links. Until the boost traffic had been very targeted, so visitors typically read more than just one article. On the other hand, there were 9 comments, each a chance to interact with a reader.

It’s cool to see the chain of traffic travel as each element kicks off another trigger leading to more traffic. It will be interesting to read the results of this second blog boost. I’ll let you know if I have anything to report back to you.

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