A new search engine focusing on purely Australian blogs has been launched called Gnoos. It is very encouraging to see such an initiative so hopefully it will be successful.

You can read an article about it in The Age here.

[Founder Ben Barren] estimates that there are about 750,000 Australian blogs scattered among a range of hosts, but when it comes to active bloggers – the segment Gnoos plans to focus on – the numbers are much smaller at about 5000.

By the looks of things, Goonanism is one of those 5000 so I’ll take that as a complement.

Some people.

I thought I was close to the man that is a .com, Mr Johal. However it would appear not.

I’ve been the most loyal reader of the blog he has not updated for 8 months, then, purely by accident I come across this.

It hurts me.

Father Bob has a blog – I am impressed.

Did you see him go Andrew Bolt? I thought Bob made him look like the twit he is.

I am a fan.

What’s going on? Webdiary was never my favorite blog, but I always deeply respected what it was trying to do.

Margo’s commitment to independent and alternative media is always something that I’ve applauded – she certainly left me inspired after her speech at Now We the People earlier in the year. It’s just a pity that she tried to make a living off it in the form she did.

Just about every example of this sort of web-based journalism that I can think of has been overly ambitious and had to scale down it’s activities at some stage so I can’t help but feel I Margo could still make something of it. Moreover, can’t she just continue in a scaled down form – more like a blog which she always insisted she was not?

But again, I guess I don’t really understand what’s going on behind the scenes so it’s hard to full appreciate.

I normally don’t comment on this sort of thing but I can’t help feeling that this is a loss.

My only hope is that our extensive IR updates continue at LP

I suppose everyone has their reasons but I just can’t imagine doing it myself and therefore find it hard to understand.

Then again, I suppose it’s often for the best.

By a Russian:

Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, 1803-1869, was a gifted man. Apart from writing philosophical books, stories for children and composing pieces of music, he also wrote science fiction, trying to imagine what his country would look like in 2,500 years, in 4338.

The fact that among other utopian inventions Odoevsky described something very close to the Internet and blogging was brought to public attention by — surprise, surprise — a blogger. Ivan Dezhurny, a Russian music producer, is generally fond of futuristic literature. Reading Odoevsky’s novel “Year 4338”, written in 1837, Dezhurny republished selected bits of the book on his personal blog to the delight of his readers.

Odoevsky suggested in future there would be a kind of connection between houses that would allow people to communicate quickly and easily, the way they do now via the Internet.

But then again:

But what’s really disturbing here is that this “Ivan Dezhurny” character is completely ungoogleable outside of the MosNews article and (as of the time stamp of this post) one referencing site with identical text. Whoever heard of an ungoogleable blogger? Sure, the Wired article hints at the possibility of blogging anonymously or under an assumed name, but then, er, wouldn’t MosNews be calling him his blog name or “an anonymous blogger”?

Of course this might have something to do with the blog being in Russian but as my Russian is lacking I guess I’ll never know.