Dipping into the Blogpond

Nearly a month ago I wrote about Blogging in Australia basically because I’m interested in local Australian content.

I thought I’d revisit that post in a more structured and in depth way. To do that effectively, we need to separate Australian Blogging into two categories – Australian blog hosts and Australian blog search engines or directories.

Australian Blog Hosts

A blog host is a website that will allow you to create a blog which sits on their site. It will then have an address such as yourblogname.theirdomain.com.au or theirdomain.com.au/yourblogname. Usually these types of accounts are free, and can be set up in a few minutes. You generally don’t need to be highly computer literate to set up one of these accounts.

Many niche sites, like Minti, Cooeey and Nook, will also allow you to set up a blog, but these have been excluded from this comparison as they are not blog hosts per say, but more an extension of their social functionality (i.e. they don’t exist merely to host blogs).

Edublogs.org

This appears to be one of the largest blog hosts in Australia and is available to students, teachers and librarians – anyone involved in education in Australia. It is built on WordPress technology and was founded by James Farmer.

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 6
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “the web”) 24,700
Alexa Rank 47,829

Note: whilst this is an Australian site, it is not recognised in “pages from Australia”

BlogNow.com.au

BlogNow was previously known as whitepage.com.au. In somewhat of a controversy, Telstra was awarded ownership of the domain in October last year. The site incorporates social networking in that bloggers are able to add friends and allows a search of bloggers via “interest”, “location” and other tags. Search of blogs is via broad categories (34) or a Google search of the site.

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 5
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “pages from Australia”) 141,000
Alexa Rank 74,061

BigBlog.com.au

This is the blog hosting offering from Telstra, which is coming up to its first anniversary and is available to all Bigpond customers. It provides interactivity via communities and voting, and posts seem to attract a lot of views. You can also post MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) messages to your blog (provided you are with Telstra).

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 6
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “pages from Australia”) 9,370
Alexa Rank 165,957

Weblogger.com.au

Weblogger appears to be in early stages of growth. It is also based on WordPress, and is tied in with AustralianBlogs (see below).

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 0
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “pages from Australia”) 36
Alexa Rank 2,952,056

The following Alexa graph compares the daily reach for the first 3 sites over the last three months.

Australian Blog Search Engines

A blog search engine allows you to search through blogs for specific terms. A blog directory, contains links to blogs, but the search functionality is somewhat restricted.

In Australia, there are only two blog search engines that I have been able to locate. The third site is a blog directory.

Gnoos.com.au

Gnoos was released in the middle of 2006. It accepts blogs via submission and has a strong Australian focus. Posts on participating blogs are regularly indexed and their content can be searched via this facility (i.e. it is not reliant on tags for searching, but does a full text search). Users can leave comments about individual posts and also vote up or down (like Digg), but this doesn’t appear to be a widely used function. I’m not sure if voting affects how results are displayed as yet.

This is a terrific site, and I’d urge all Australian bloggers to add your blog to this site – the more they get, the more comprehensive the local search results will be (and yes, it’s free).

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 6
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “pages from Australia”) 250,000
Alexa Rank 179,681

TheAustralianIndex

The Australian Index is another site that allows users to search Australian blogs. This site also lists blogs via direct submission and also allows users to specify which Australian State they are from. They list around 2,275 blogs and posts are frequently indexed. They include a Technorati ranking for many of the blogs listed (although I’m not sure how often this is updated, as I noticed my ranking is quite old), and blogs can be searched by their Technorati ranking.

Their home page lists recently updated blogs, and this is updated periodically during the day. You can also search for images in blogs, as these are indexed as well. I’m not sure when this site was established, or who runs it, but it appears on the Alexa radar in the middle of 2006.

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 3
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “pages from Australia”) 3,300
Alexa Rank 236,014

Both are great tools for searching for local content, and each are slightly different in what the offer.

Australian Blog Directory

AustralianBlogs.com.au (which redirects to www.buggerall.com.au)

This site lists around 1,200 Australian Blogs and is searchable by tags. It accepts blogs via submission, but I would urge anyone submitting a blog to give serious thought to the tags you are going to assign to your blog first, because this is how your blog will be searched and you only get one shot at it.

Still a great resource, but probably not as fully functional as Gnoos and The Australian Index. This is part of a suite of sites which includes weblogger.com.au (see above) and Australian Wiki, which I mentioned previously.

Google Page Rank (Home Page) 6
Pages Indexed (in Google.com.au “pages from Australia”) 13,400 (buggerall.com.au)
Alexa Rank 361,014

Below is an Alexa graph comparing the three sites in terms of daily reach

So, in summary, if you are an existing Australian blog owner, I would suggest that you submit your site to these three sites – help fellow Aussies to find you! And please, if I’ve missed any sites in this review, please let me know via the comments so I can add them.