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Aussie Blogs is now permanently closed after helping pioneer the first five years of Australian weblogging
You can still view the full database of sites by popularity as of 10th April 2005, the day Aussie Blogs closed. I am no longer responsible for the Aussie Blogs web ring, former members should now remove the Aussie Blogs web ring links from their web sites.
For posterity, here's a brief history of Aussie Blogs by Anthony Hicks:
Aussie Blogs was the first, original and most complete directory of Australian weblogs between 2000 and 2005. The site began when there were only a couple of hundred Australians blogging, and by the final year of operation was tracking over 8,500 Australian Blogs, delivering over 1 million referrals to listed sites during it’s operation. Aussie Blogs received a good share of press coverage over the years with write ups and mentions in internet.au magazine, The Australian, Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers, and on ABC Radio and ABC TV.
Aussie Blogs used a combination of methods to track updated Australian blogs and provided an easy to use, up to the minute list of recently updated Australian weblogs on the front page. You could filter updated blogs by last updated time, and Australian state or territory. You could even subscribe to a single aggregated RSS feed of all known Aussie Blogs, giving you the whole of Australia in one feed, updated every few minutes. You could also view Aussie Blogs by click-thru Popularity and Recent Posts.
So how did it all start? Aussie Blogs started off as a web ring in March 2000. By this time I had already been blogging on and off for almost two years, and was surprised with the small number of Australian weblogs emerging. A web ring seemed to be a great way of highlighting Australian weblogs and promoting blogging in Australia. The first site to join was Mike at tripleoptix (no longer a weblog). From there a steady stream of Australian bloggers joined. By August 2000 there were 50 members, 80 in November 2000, and in January 2001 Silent Type by Christopher Bieg was the 100th Aussie Blogger.
While the web ring was great as a list of sites, I wanted a more effective way of driving traffic to Aussie Blogs, so I used the Weblogs.com (then My.UserLand.Com) Recently Updated Favourites feature that let you create a list of weblogs in your UserLand profile and display these on your own site using JavaScript. It worked well, every Aussie blogger who joined was added to my UserLand profile, and from there UserLand would check that site periodically for updates and display an hourly list of updated blogs on the Aussie Blogs homepage -- the Aussie Blogs Update Tracker was born!
In September 2000, Yahoo! took over WebRing.com, this led to a series of extremely poor decisions on the part of Yahoo! as they tried to re-brand WebRing.com and squeeze revenue out of their acquisition. Through a misunderstanding of WebRing.com and its users they ruined the service that so many had used for years to find sites in specific vertical interest areas. Many members lost their accounts during migration, many rings were abandoned, the interface was changed and the level of control ring masters had over their rings was significantly reduced. By October 2001 Yahoo! gave up on WebRing.com, and it was subsequently bought out by some of the original owners who to this day are still trying to get it back on track. To be honest, WebRing.com is a lost cause, they will never be able to return it to its original glory pre-Yahoo! days, and really, the whole concept seems quite irrelevant now.
In September 2000 I grabbed Australian.Weblogs.Com and pointed it to the Aussie Blogs site running as a sub-directory on my personal site. In September 2001 Weblogs.com changed the way it detected an updated blog. Instead of visiting each site and checking if it had changed, Dave Winer implemented the now widely used ping approach where a message via XML-RPC, SOAP or HTTP POST was sent to Weblogs.com to indicate that the weblog had been updated. This was a logical and smart move due to the exponentially increasing number of weblogs and the difficulty UserLand was having scaling to detect changes in all these sites. Unfortunately many of the Aussie bloggers back then used blogging software that did not yet support sending ping, or who were simply not technical enough to grasp and implement the ping concept on their sites.
So, in November 2001 I set about developing my own update tracker methods for detecting weblog posts that relied on page size and date comparisons. By the end of the December 2001, CheckerBot was up and running with my own standalone detection routines monitoring around 170 sites. By 2003, I was having similar problems to UserLand in checking the increasing number of Australian weblogs emerging, so in June 2003 at the suggestion of Brendan McKitrick I finally programmed a new bot, ChangesBot, that checked the changes.xml file from Weblogs.com, blo.gs and Blogger.com for updated sites matching the Aussie Blogs database. This significantly reduced the number of sites that needed to be visited by CheckerBot every few hours looking for updates, and significantly increased the scalability and accuracy of the update tracker. I also programmed another clever bot called FinderBot which would constantly scour the net searching for new Australian weblogs and automatically add them to the Update Tracker. After some tweaking FinderBot became very good at acquiring Aussie Blogs, and was automatically adding hundreds of new blogs every week, in addition to user contributions.
In June 2003, I added the Topic Tracker, Rank Tracker and Popularity. Topic Tracker collected ALL the links appearing on Aussie Blogs and attempted to create a constantly changing view of what Aussie Bloggers are linking to, similar to how blogdex or Technorati worked. There were hundreds of special link parsing rules behind the scenes applied to the links found to ensure only relevant links appeared on the Topic Tracker, along with a first noticed/last noticed/count ranking algorithm.
Rank Tracker showed the most popular links of all time appear on Aussie Blogs, obviously this is dominated by links to Blogger, Moveable Type etc. Popularity showed the most clicked on Aussie Blogs from the update tracker. In March 2004, I added the Recent Posts page which aggregated the last posts from the RSS feed of each blog updated.
By April 2005, the site was still hugely popular with tens of thousands of unique visits per month, however the time required to maintain the site was too great and I decided to put my efforts into other things. After looking around quite extensively for someone technically competent to take over the Aussie Blogs site, no one stepped up so unfortunately I had to close the site. Thanks to all the member sites for your support. Let’s hope someone with the time develops a better replacement soon.
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