Dipping into the Blogpond

A small mention at Mashable today about a local version of the Netvibes home page now being available in Australia so I thought I’d mosey on over & take a peak.

First mistake was going to www.netvibes.com.au (don’t bother going it’s full of unrelated CPC advertising). Now I would have thought that they would have THAT base covered. So off to the real site which is supposed to update with local content if you haven’t been there before, but I have.

The instruction says “Australian users can now access local content through the “Add content” side bar. First time visitors from Australia will automatically see the local version. (To change your language and local content, click on “settings” at the top of your Netvibes page)”.

Despite looking, I couldn’t find the “add content” side bar, but it *is* a busy page. But that was easily fixed by going to the settings, selecting “local content” and clicking on the map of Australia.

A couple of interesting observations. There is a “search the web” box, which allows you to search Google, Yahoo! and Live (also Snap), but unfortunately these have not been customised to the “.com.au” domains, so the search results are not localised which is a shame.

Links for News and other categories are fairly predictable, and then there’s a link to the Australian Web 2.0 bloggers in that network (great job guys). Namely:-Alan Jones, Ben Barren, Darren Rowse, Cameron Reilly, Richard Giles, Duncan Riley, James Farmer and Nik Cubrilovic (these blogs can all be accessed via the Australian Web 2.0 page).

What perplexes me is the list of “Best Australian Blogs”. I wonder how they came up with this list? And some of them appear to be NZ blogs. I’ve only heard of one of these bloggers and I have been looking quite closely at Australian Blogs lately. So here’s the list:

A Yobbo’s View, Allthings2all (which is a NZ blog), Daily Flute, danielbowen.com: Diary of an Average Australian, Deltoid, Fish8me.com, It’s A Matter Of Opinion, Katiefoolery, Larvatus Prodeo, Making Girls Run Since 1982 –, one foot down the rabbit hole, Samuel’s Blog, Silent Running (NZ?), Sir Humphrey’s (NZ), Slattsnews, SunnyO, The Currency Lad (which hasn’t been touched since August 06 – unless it’s moved), Tim Blair, image.a.nation.

I’m not saying that any one of these blogs don’t deserve to be there, but there seems a few notable omissions. Can’t say I’ll be using the Netvibes home page, but I certainly have a few Aussie blogs to check out.