Dipping into the Blogpond

I wrote a post recently entitled Blogging in Australia, in which I touched briefly on the “.com.au” domain. I wonder if I am alone searching for local Australian content? In performing “pages from Australia” only searches on Google? Perhaps running two very localised websites – an Australian local business directory site and an Australian funeral notices site slants my searching habits, but I don’t think so.

Please don’t get me wrong. A lot of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are located in the US, Canada or elsewhere, and certainly a lot of the content is globally relevant. There is certainly a lot of talk about the world heading towards “globalisation”. But I wonder about the sustainability of this on an internet that is increasing in size exponentially.

I think there will be a rise in niche markets, and I think locality is one of those niches. Competition is becoming just too fierce in generalised markets. I applaud the initiative of Australian startups such as Minti, Don’t Forget the Milk Remember the Milk (Doh! I can’t believe I actually typed that in – and there is a registered domain for “dontforgetthemilk.com“) and Whooiz.com who have backed their product on the global domain, but these subject areas (i.e. parenting, self-organisation and profiling) aren’t location specific.

I read a post on Alister Cameron’s blog yesterday, that not only has he registered a .com domain, but he has also gone to the lengths of relocating his host to one in the US. I understand that this may help in terms of coping with large traffic surges, but what would that do if one was searching for a “blog consultant” in the “pages from Australia”.Has he lost his ties with Australia by hosting off shore? That may not be an issue to Alister – his market (and revenue source) may be deemed to be in the US, or he might have powerful enough SEO to overcome this issue, but for a local search, this would have to be a disadvantage. (n.b. having said that Alister does show up as a #2 for blog consultant in both the “search the web” and “pages from Australia” searches, so maybe there are ways to get around this).

The world is a big place. More and more we have to filter out what is not relevant to us. That’s why I prefer to search locally, and get the information that is most relevant to me. I’m interested in what Australian bloggers have to say. Often they are writing about topics that have greatest relevance to me or the “domain” that I am in. Just wish we could organise ourselves a bit better, and have a little more faith in ourselves as a community and a market.

In his Monday article “Search Party to Last all Year“, I think Michael Sainsbury was way out of line in saying “It’s not like this clever country is producing ventures such as MySpace, YouTube, Bibo or the latest web-based social networking sensation, SecondLife”. These kind of phenomena are rare. We produce plenty of good stuff.