The Mighty Clarence
Saturday 22 August 2009
Other Aussie pollies with domain names up for grabs
After the brief kefuffle over the fact that the Nats managed to corral nathanrees.com.au, I decided to have a looksee at which other Aussie pollies may be vulnerable at the next round of state and federal elections because of domain parking or cybersquatting on their names.
The first to surface was malcolmturnbull.net which is up for sale.
Followed by the rather puzzling active but restricted site kevinrudd.net (created in the USA) which was also up for eBay auction by Sean Slater in 2007.
It was still for sale just before Kevin07 won the federal title bout against John Howard.
Although NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell has managed to get his dot coms all to himself, nobody in his party thought to capture barryofarrell.net or barryofarrell.org it seems.
As for NSW Nats Leader Andrew Stoner - well he has andrewstoner.com.au (andrewstoner.com is another restricted currently inactive site) but andrewstoner.net as well as andrew stoner.org appear to be up for grabs.
Which sorta makes the Nats open to a little payback after all their crowing on ABC News Radio yesterday.
And before other senior pollies start to feel smug - a fella in Los Angeles has parked on joehockey.net and tonyabbott.net is about to become available to the first taker.
Already available is tonyabbott.org.
One can almost feel the online political parodies forming out in cyberspace.
Friday 21 August 2009
North Coast Voices: blog visitor profile
Earlier this week North Coast Voices received a rather nice email via Boy the Wonder Cat's address:
Just a short note to say what a good job you do at independent news gathering. The site looks great. Too many great contributions to reply to all, so pass on my regards. I felt a bit intimidated that there are no comments for any posts. Do you get many hits locally? I hope so, it is a much better read than the Star or the Echo.
Now it is true that there are few comments made on North Coast Voices posts and, it is always fascinating to see the number of emails sent to our blogging cat or mention made of us in the local media in lieu of using the blog's comment section.
However, this is not something that troubles us as we are like half the blogosphere ourselves - mostly 'lurkers' nor comment makers.
The email did get me thinking though about giving readers a little feedback.
Yes, we are getting a growing number of local northern NSW visitors to the blog and North Coast Voices now appears in blog roll links on a number of other Australian websites for which we are grateful.
Current readership is roughly divided into 50 per cent Australian visitors to the blog and 50 per cent visitors from overseas. Some readers stay for a minute or so and a few stay for half an hour or more.
Readers can be as close as the Tweed and Coffs Harbour or as far away as Tunisia and Chile. Both Canberra and Washington DC frequently feature in any location breakdown by month.
Various government department and university computers across the country also have a peek at what our authors have to say. As of course does Monsanto and other multinational companies we mention from time to time.
North Coast Voices has been up and running for twenty-two months and has it's second birthday in early October.
A big thankyou to all who read this blog.
Sounds of Australia film and sound archive nominations for 2010
Media has been reporting the fact that this month the 1954 Vegemite advertisement jingle has made it into the national film and sound archive, along with recordings of the Newcastle Steelworks Band, TI's Georgia Lee singing the blues, Bidjigal man Vic Simms' protest songs, and six more examples of Australiana.
The National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia is a public registry of recordings that celebrates the unique and diverse recorded sound culture and history of Australia. It was launched in February 2007 with a foundation list of 10. Each year, public nominations are called and 10 recordings added to the Registry, selected from the nominations by a panel of experts from the recorded sound industry and cultural institutions.
Nominations for next year's inclusions on this list officially begin in January 2010.How to nominate, including online form, here.
About Vegemite:
In 1922, Dr Cyril Callister, a young food chemist, created a distinctive 'pure vegetable extract' at the Fred Walker Cheese Factory and food processing plant in Dandenong, Victoria. A nation-wide competition in 1923 yielded the name Vegemite. In 1926 Walker sold their creation to Kraft Foods of Chicago and passed over the secret recipe.
The first radio jingle for Vegemite appeared in 1954. In this, three 'Happy Little Vegemites' sang their toe-tapping song almost ad nauseam. With the advent of television in 1956, the jingle became a television commercial. The Vegemite jingle has been used in advertising campaigns for Vegemite ever since.
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