The highs and lows of publishing contributor dependent websites

21 January 2026

Manuel Moreale writing about People and Blogs, where he features regular interviews with bloggers:

It sucks because, since day one, I tried to find a good balance between keeping the series running smoothly and not letting guests wait for months and months to get their interview published. But I’m at the point where I can no longer do that. More than a few times, I found myself with the queue completely empty while waiting for dozens of people to get back to me. Every time someone came through in the end, and the series kept marching on week after week, but let me tell you: it’s not fun.

For a few years, between 2005 and 2007, I published a website about the creative and artistic work and projects of Australians, called OnVoiceOver (Internet Archive link). The name was a geeky word play on OnMouseOver, an old JavaScript event handler.

But OnVoiceOver, or OVO as I’d call it, was not an interview series like People and Blogs. Interviews with well known web people were already common circa 2005, and I wanted to try a different approach. So instead of posting interviews with people, I wrote an article about their work.

OVO also sported an ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, on account of its (intended) periodic publication schedule. I tried in vain to get an ISSN for disassociated, but was told blogs were not considered to be periodic publications. Oh, really?

OVO was (mostly) fun while it lasted. Some of the people I featured included Cameron Adams, who later co-found Canva, artist and writer Lang Leav, and artist Brad Eastman.

Long story short: I’d contact someone I wanted to profile (though sometimes people messaged me). After they agreed, I’d send them some questions, and use the answers, once received, to write the article. Once three articles were finished, I would then publish a new edition.

Like People and Blogs, OVO, despite the sole Australian focus, should have had sufficient fodder, content wise, to remain publishing indefinitely. After all, new and exciting ideas were coming along constantly. It’s not like there was nothing else to write about, after I posted the twenty-seventh, and final, article in August 2007.

But I was also in the situation where I was waiting on people, who had agreed to participate, some of whom I knew personally, to get back to me with their answers. On the other side of that, there were those who had returned answers, wondering when their feature would be posted.

I’d sometimes desperately trawl through news and forum posts of the likes of (erstwhile) Australian design portals, Australian Infront and Design is Kinky, to see if there was an idea I was able to quickly work with, so the next edition could go out. Perhaps my decision to post articles in groups of three was not so clever after all, and I should have gone with a single article format.

But I doubt that would have made much difference. I know everyone who participated was busy. They had jobs and careers to focus on. They had families to spend time with. When I’d follow up, I’d often receive messages to the effect of “oh yes, I keep saying to myself I must answer these questions as soon as possible”.

OVO quite likely had a less pronounced profile than People and Blogs, but it surprises me would-be participants are dragging their heels. A People and Blogs profile must be accompanied by a pleasing spike in traffic, and likely some new readers in the process.

In the end though, it wasn’t a few people not returning their answers to me that spelt the end of OVO. Migrating disassociated to WordPress, in mid 2007 was what did it. Somehow interest in the WordPress-ed version of disassociated skyrocketed, almost overnight, and visits increased ten-fold within a few months. This was, of course, the so-called golden-age of blogging.

My energy and focus was firmly there by that point. Eventually enough people returned answers allowing me to publish a final edition of OVO in August 2007, six months after the previous one. About two years later, OVO officially went into hiatus. The website remained online for quite a while, and in 2019 I finally relinquished OVO’s domain name.

Since my days of publishing OVO — and it did occur to me this was happening twenty years ago — I’m far more cautious about publishing what I call contributor dependent content. I try to do as much as possible here by myself, even though some of us like to think this is a collaborative medium.

I also seldom involve myself in other people’s projects, aware that my taking months to make a contribution, after saying I’d do so “in a few days”, is not helping matters.

But for the frustrations that come with operating People and Blogs, I remain hopeful the interviews will continue to be published for some long time to come yet.

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Nearly five million Australian social media accounts deactivated after ban

19 January 2026

Clare Armstrong writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

More than 4.7 million accounts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat were deactivated in the first two days of the ban that started on December 10, according to new data released by the federal government.

The social media ban, supposedly to stop Australians under the age of sixteen accessing numerous such platforms, has seen nearly five million accounts closed in the last five weeks.

Here’s hoping the lockout is having the desired impact, whatever exactly that was, though it may be a while before we know one way or the other.

digg.com two-point-zero officially relaunches

16 January 2026

The first version of digg, something many people called the front page of the internet, arrived in 2004, and was a little like what Hacker News is today.

A social bookmarking news aggregator, if you want to be technical. People could submit items of interest, and those favoured by the community would win a place on digg’s coveted front page, resulting in viral levels of traffic.

digg went through a number of iterations after co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson sold the website in 2012, before Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, bought digg (again) in March 2025.

I’m hardly a social media power user (not that digg is really a social media platform) so didn’t get much involved in the pre-(re)-launch buildup, but couldn’t resist signing up yesterday when I saw digg had officially returned.

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SXSW Sydney cancels 2026 event, leaves Australia

15 January 2026

Eleanor Dickinson, writing for Mumbrella:

South by Southwest (SXSW) has cancelled its Sydney event — which has been held just three times — citing a “changing global environment that is impacting major events, festivals and cultural programs worldwide”.

Purely anecdotal, but one or two of the tech people on my social feeds, who attend such events, had described SXSW Sydney speaker lineups as “not too inspiring”, or words to that effect.

Despite this — from what I can gather — attendances at the past three Sydney events were not disappointing. The cancellation however seems tied to factors other than speaker lineups, and attendances though, with cost being one of them.

I wouldn’t have minded going to SXSW, but I would have preferred that be in Austin, in the US state of Texas, where the festival originated in 1987.

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Adelaide Writers’ Week on the brink following author boycotts

13 January 2026

Hannah Story, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

Authors including Miles Franklin winners Michelle de Kretser and Melissa Lucashenko will boycott Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) to protest the cancellation of an event featuring Palestinian Australian author, lawyer and activist Randa Abdel-Fattah. Other authors who have withdrawn from the festival include Peter Greste, Yanis Varoufakis, Evelyn Araluen, Amy McQuire, Clare Wright, Chelsea Watego, Bernadette Brennan and Amy Remeikis.

The boycott is in response to the removal of Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 event, scheduled to start at the end of February.

Organisers felt Abdel-Fattah’s presence would “not be culturally sensitive” in the wake of last December’s mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which targeted the Jewish community.

Although organisers say Abdel-Fattah’s writing played no part whatsoever in the atrocity, they were concerned by her long standing anti-Israel sentiments.

Abdel-Fattah has asked organisers to reinstate her, while more writers are threatening to withdraw from the event if this does not happen.

Update: Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) 2026 event has been cancelled. The Adelaide Festival, of which AAW is a part, will however still run.

Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone

12 January 2026

Anil Dash:

The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

I’ve never used Markdown, created by John Gruber, aided by the late Aaron Swartz, in 2004, I still add the Markup included in my web writing either through copy and paste, or manually.

That’s the former web designer in me talking. If I want to add, say, bold formatting to some text, how hard is it to type out the <strong> tag, and </strong> to close it again?

Of course, I can see how much easier it would be to type **bold** using Markdown instead, if I wanted to apply bold formatting somewhere. But the real story is just how widely used the formatting tool has become since Gruber released it twenty-two years ago.

I don’t really mean to say “Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone”, but that seems to be what has happened.

Much of Australia presently in the grip of a heatwave

8 January 2026

Most Australia states, with the reported exception of Queensland, are in the grip of a heatwave. Temperatures in our part of the world, the NSW Central Coast, are expected to reach the high thirties, Celsius, on Saturday. That’ll be a little too warm at our place here, which doesn’t have AC.

We’ll go into Sydney, where ironically Saturday’s high is (presently) forecast to peak at forty-two degrees, Celsius. However we will have AC there.

We remain hopeful the southerly buster will come through not too late in the day though. This is a wind change from the south (bringing chilled Antarctic air northwards), and can see temperatures drop by up to twenty-degrees over the course of fifteen to twenty minutes.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, a heatwave occurs in Australia when the maximum and minimum temperatures are unusually hot over three days. We’re only one day into this, and already feeling the pinch. Accumulating heat will make Friday uncomfortable, to say nothing of Saturday.

It’s going to be a difficult time for a lot of people, with bush fires in some places making matters worse. Do whatever you can to stay cool over the next few days.

The more personal websites there are, the better the web will be

6 January 2026

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

The website (to destroy all websites) in question is the personal website, because through personal websites, we build the web we want to have. If you only read one article about the present state of the web, make it this one.

Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence in 2025

5 January 2026

Simon Willison’s third annual review of the AI space, for last year. I read someone saying somewhere that Willison has become expert in AI and LLM since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022.

He’s not the only one (obviously), but in late 2022 and early 2023 I was having conversations with people about ChatGPT and AI. At the time a number of these people looked at me blankly. One said they kept hearing about ChatGPT, but knew little about it.

Fast forward three years, and two of these people — who knew next to nothing about the topic — went on to assume senior roles in their workplaces overseeing the development and deployment of AI technologies. Positions that didn’t exist in 2022.

Possibly I regret my decision to remain focused on writing copy, content, and maybe even blogging here, instead of somehow jumping on the AI train. But on the other hand, possibly I don’t.

Adam Mosseri: the old, personal, Instagram feed is dead

5 January 2026

But that’s what Instagram’s (IG) owner wanted of course. Put another way, this means anyone using IG is expected to behave like an influencer, even if they only have a handful of followers.

The comment was made by Mosseri, Head of Meta owned IG, in a year-end presentation (Instagram link), a few days ago. That Mosseri didn’t label his thoughts Instagram Wrapped is a small mercy.

The IG leader also made the point that authenticity is becoming ever harder to gauge, on account of the proliferation of generative AI tools. It doesn’t matter that Meta is playing a part here, what’s important is ascertaining what content posted to IG is genuine, and what is AI generated.

This means more layers of verification, and not just for content, but users also. If that’s not for you, now’s a good time to jump ship. Provided you can establish a presence somewhere else.

But that’s not going to be most people. They have IG pages that their businesses and livelihoods depend upon, and have not realised just how, bit by bit, reliant they’ve become on the platform.

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