Dipping into the Blogpond

I am a newcomer to blogging, and have only recently set up an RSS reader (Google Reader, which does the job for me). I have very quickly grown to a list of 25 subscriptions & I fear I’m becoming a bit of a blog junkie. But everybody’s content seems so interesting. What has struck me […]

My son sent me a link to some “actual” headlines in newspapers. They had me laughing. His favourite is “Panda mating fails – veterinarian takes over”, mine is “Blind woman gets new kidney from dad she hasn’t seen in years” and for stating the obvious “If strike isn’t settled quickly it may last a while”. […]

Sorry, I couldn’t resist this homophone. But it really annoys me seeing so much good money spent marketing a product that is so far inferior to the competition that it’s not funny. Another prime example of exposure not buying success. Sensis (who also run the White Pages ® and Yellow Pages ® directories, among other […]

I read at Under The Rotunda today that Fairfax “may” have bought Essential Baby (and good luck to them, if that’s true). From what I can see, there are two other big players in this niche – Bub Hub and newcomer Minti. I’ve had a look around these sites, and thought I’d do a bit […]

When Obits was launched a year ago, there was very limited competition in online funeral notices in Australia. The main players were the newspaper sites:- Fairfax (who link notices from The Syndey Morning Herald, The Age, The Newcastle Herald, Fairfax Community Newspapers and Illawarra Mercury) and News Limited. There was also the regional niche website […]

Today I read an article on Techcrunch about a website called Conduit which allows users to create customised downloadable toolbars for their websites. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for quite some time for dLook, so I was quite excited to have a look. The process per se, is really simple for even […]

News Limited’s (News Interactive) truelocal (a local business search directory) launched in Australia on the 30 January, 2006 with the Headline “Not Happy Jan? Try truelocal.com.au“. Which is a play on the well known Yellowpages.com.au advertisement with the catchphrase “Not Happy, Jan!”. I’m going to do my best to be objective here (disclosure: I am […]

I took my three girls to see “Happy Feet” today. Expecting a large crowd (weekend, school holidays, overcast day) I thought I was very clever booking online. I could choose the seats I wanted, the tickets would be ready to pick up – no queues. The online service was good, but the reality was there […]

At the beginning of November 2005, a friend of ours died. He was more a “friend of a friend” I suppose, we’d see him at John’s functions a few times a year. But we liked Billy and when he died suddenly we wanted to go to the funeral and pay our respects. Billy died in […]

Following on from In The Beginning (dLook), our next step was to find a developer up to the task. We were introduced to Ben Stickland from Alliance Software. I can’t stress enough how invaluable Ben & the Alliance Team have been. From the outset, Ben impressed us – both with his technical ability and marketing […]