With the release of Gnoos, the new Australian blog search engine (that’s quite a mouthful) I thought it pertinent to show a quick cross-section of some of my favourite blogs at the moment. I think it would be worth your time to go and have a look, I open my reader every day hoping that I will see a new post from one of these guys.

• Decisive Moments. A man and his bike(s). It’s gripping stuff every Monday or Tuesday hearing about the latest races.
• Jameses has been blogging up a storm lately, a good stream of consciousness style that makes me enjoy the random observations of my friends.
• Ftrain. You need to read to believe, I love the writing and the concept of the Ftrain. If only he would write more often.
• Fi has just started this, and so far it far outweighs expectations. I sincerely hope her jaunts that she is going to switch it off as quickly as she started are in jest.

I have posted before regarding the uptake of RSS in Australia. Since that last post, there has not been much more adoption of the technology, news.com.au still doesn’t have it (not even AustralianIT). None of this particularly surprises me, usually we have terrible uptake on good for the consumer developments.

What did surprise me was to see the prominance of RSS feeds on AFL.com.au, there are 2, one for the main stories and another for the Footy Blog. Having seen it on the footy website, I looked on Baggy Green and low and behold I see the little orange icon. Needless to say, I have subscribed.

It’s hard to describe how happy I am that news of the real world will now be flowing through my NewsReader.

It has been said on many occasions that the blogosphere is an echo chamber. Whether it is or not, it generally brings good, new content to the eyes of many. This works because each person with a blog subscribes to a heap of blogs, and they point to interesting things they see. So, given a couple of iterations most people will have seen something pass through their aggregator.

This is very similar to the Brazil Nut theory where the smaller particles work their way under the bigger particles and push them to the top.

That’s all fairly obvious and elementary, until you add the meme-trackers to the frey. People start going to Memeorandum for their fix. This works by watching a certain group of bloggers and pointing to stories that start getting a little bit of traction. Problem is, that people like Robert Scoble who has been one of the best linkers start using the Meme tracker and stop reading the same content. In essence, he has only been linking to what has already worked it’s way to the top.

However if everyone who Memeorandum was watching, only watched Memeorandum, nothing new would ever be come to the top, unless of coursed it was produced by the memetracker’s list. In essence, this would be like having a jar of brazil nuts, with no peanuts to help bring the good stuff to the top.

So Scoble, thank you for trying to shake the jar and bringing the good nuts to the top again.

When is a blog not a blog?

When nobody blogs on it.