I have found Australians are very straightforward in expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is surprising however, to find only a few thousand active bloggers in Australia. Pity!

Meg in her Recounting Australian Blogs has posted these questions. I have been thinking to write on these lines for a while. So, Here are my thoughts.

What ideas do you have for promoting Aussie blogs and bloggers?

1. Telly (television) will be my first medium to promote blogs and blogging. Do a special episode (or a series) about Blogging in prime-time shows such as current affairs, today tonight.
2. Running an advert on a newspaper is the next best thing. Even if we put together 50 cents each, we can publish an ad on the Sunday newspaper. The promotion lines could be ..”Start a blog, Change Australia”, “Express yourself with a blog” (dont laugh!).
3. Running a “Great Aussie Blogs” contest and let the readers vote on blogs under different categories.
4. Creating an awareness on different blogging media and platforms – I mean people can microblog with twitter, tumblr . Not only text – audio blogs, photo blogs, video blogs as well, there are plenty of opportunities.
5. Create blogs for your friends, parents and grandparents. We don’t have time, but there are people out there who have plenty of time. Ask them to blog, anything.

Do you think we do enough (considering the above named local blog searches and directories)? What are we lacking?

Blog directories, aggregation, rankings are good (from blogger’s perspective). But, it lacks the interaction from readers. I would like to see a blog posts aggregation page – which shows Most read posts, Most commented posts, Recent posts, Recently updated blogs (the last two things are already done by australian index) and a voting feature for the readers (a thumbs up or thumbs down sign).

How often do we stumble upon to a fresh aussie blog? Not often. We should work on a model where blogs can be discovered by readers – a stumble upon like toolbar (it could be web based as well) for australian bloggers. How about featuring a “Blog of the Day” on the Directory’s home page

There are plenty of such ‘Aussie Blog Directories’ but none of them is complete – all have rss aggregation, rankings and a search. Not enough if you want to develop a blog portal. As a reader, I enjoy reading a regional language (Tamil) portal named Thamizmanam (they have an English portal but – it didn’t go well). Another similar blog portal is Thenkoodu (in the same language). I can list the features they have if anyone wants to develop such a blog portal.

We can have forums – but people never would be the first to start posting in it. So, post a topic and invite people (pro bloggers) to write on a specific topic like this, “What ideas do you have for promoting Aussie blogs and bloggers?“. Everyone will chip in with their ideas.

If you were to set up a new domain for promoting the aussosphere what would you do with it?

I would develop a site from the reader’s perspective. Easy to browse, plenty of things to get lost into – is it a dream?

If you have more ideas, comment here or even better write them in your blog (a blog post gained).

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