Nicholas Gruen is organizing a group subscription to Crikey. Big savings are available. To capture network externalities, get in contact with him. Details here

Akismet has started flagging lots of genuine comments as spam. I’m manually despamming when I get time, and will work on a fix when I get some more time – probably not for a week or two, unfortunately. So apologies for the disrupted discussion, brickbats to spammers of all kinds, and hope that normal service will return soon.

Some time in the past few days, my WordPress dashboard recorded its 50 000-th comment. I meant to watch out for it and note the lucky commenter, but I’ve been travelling and missed it. These comments span the period since the beginning of 2004 – I lost thousands of comments in the Great Database Disaster of 2003, and there were lots more in an early commenting system called Haloscan that I never managed to transfer.

Comments are a crucial element of a blog, and I’d like to thank both regular and occasional commenters for their contributions and for the fact that, most of the time, discussion here is sufficiently civilised and constructive to advance our understanding of the issues. If you’ve thought about commenting, but not got around here, this post would be a great opportunity

On the other hand there’s the spammers who make running comments much harder than it should be. I’ve only been running Akismet for six months or so, and its already picked up more than the 50 000 genuine comments accumulated over three years.

Akismet has been marking most incoming comments as spam. I’ve rescued a bunch of them, but no doubt not all. Apologies to people whose comments have been lost.

With luck, manual correction will fix the problem. If not, I may have to move to some sort of active verification scheme, a step I’ve always rejected.

If you post a comment and it doesn’t appear, please email me.

I’ll be taking things more slowly over summer. With luck this will translate into occasional reflective essays. More regular posting will resume sometime in the New Year.

Club Troppo has a great new feature (actually, a revival of an old one from Ken’s days at the Parish Pump). Called the Missing Link, it’s an intelligent ‘best of Ozplogistan’ selection each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Here’s a recent example

Once my slow-motion site redesign is finished, I’ll add a link to an RSS feed, but you can probably pick this up over at Troppo.

Back in August 2005, Anita Quigley had this to say about blogging:

“Why some pimply-faced geek, sicko or average Joe Blow thinks someone else wants to read every random thought that crosses their mind is beyond me. Alongside the belief that we all have a novel in us – we haven’t – blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism.�

Hmm

For the first time in its history, Wikipedia is #10 in Alexa’s daily Traffic Rank though not in the official top 10.

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Tim Dunlop has just announced that he will be running a blog for News Limited, on their news.com.au site. The title is Blogocracy, and it’s going to start on Monday.

Tim’s blog, Road to Surfdom, will continue, which is good since it’s always been my favorite among Australian blogs. I was reading the Crikey report on this, and it made an observation that had also occurred to me.

At the very least, the News Limited move suggests that a a back door into journalism is ajar. Don’t want to do a communications course followed by a cadetship to break into journalism? Consider starting up a blog – if you can make it good enough to get noticed.

Tim isn’t the first to follow this route. Back in the Cambrian era of Australian blogging (2003), Gareth Parker was one of the pioneers. He got a job with the West Australian, but giving up blogging was part of the deal, if I recall correctly. Admittedly, Gareth was a journalism student, so it wasn’t just the blog that got him the job, but it didn’t do any harm.