Dipping into the Blogpond

1. New blogs debuting in the Top 100 Australian Blogs

• Life in the Country

2. New blogs on the Australian Blogs Community

SEO Blog
Facibus on Blogging
HumaneIA
The Canberra Blog
Faz the Cat
Glog
Business, E-Commerce and other Musings
On Blogging Australia
Pommygranate

Reminder: Anybody who would like to add (or update) the Aussie blogs from Bumpzee to their blogroll can find an A to Z list and a downunder version (Z to A). Snoskred keeps these updated weekly.

We now have 120 members, 144 blogs, 7393 entries and some really great discussion. Is your blog there?

3. Aussie Blog Post of the Week & 4. Spotlight on an Aussie Blogs Community Blog (Bumpzee)

This week I’d like to introduce you to Lori who has a blog called Lori’s Cubes. Lori has been blogging since 2000, so you could certainly call her an “early adopter”! She writes about a range of topics including blogging, her work, family and friends. She writes well, with an easy to read style. Her blog design is one of the most visually striking I’ve ever come across.

Lori is a call centre team leader at a major telco. This means she often has to take escalated calls from dissatisfied customers. Lori wrote a post the other day highlighting how stressful it can be for customer service representatives. This serves as a poignant reminder that these reps are just doing their jobs, they’re real people with real feelings. If their employers do not provide adequate numbers of staff to reduce waiting time, it’s not the employees fault. Please keep that in mind before you verbally abuse the Lori’s of this world. From “Post Lag”

Newsflash – we know the call queues are long. We know you have been on hold for 45+++ minutes, we’re sorry. Very Very Sorry. Shouting at call centre staff about the wait does nothing but make them and sometimes, me, want to cry after being abused for 10 minutes on the phone. Thanks to the woman who screamed at me for 20 minutes over $1.80 that wasn’t refunded back to her account. I’m very glad then you got that off your chest, now please, hang up, and let me try and pull my shattered self together so the consultants sitting near my desk don’t see my face and how I feel, since I have to keep them motivated and flying the flag.

5. Other News

I took my own advice and registered the business name “Blogpond”. I also looked at the options for registering your own domain and dealing with copyright and plagiarism.

I suffered from an email address spoofing attack (on another of my websites), which sent me back 1,200 “undelivered messages” in 4 hours. This is called backscatter.

Goodness only knows how many emails went out – these were only the ones that were not delivered. Certainly makes a case for NOT having a “catchrest” email account.

6. From the Aussosphere

John Lampard interviewed me as part of his “Five Questions” series. Thanks John for my first blogger to blogger interview!

Ross Dawson wrote an interesting post looking at The 9 Motivations to Participate in Networks.

Darren Rowse at Problogger has unveiled his fresh new design and logo. It’s completely different to what it was!

Des Walsh is hanging up his hat at Business and Blogging. B5Media are looking for a blogger to take over.