Spotify listeners shun Australian music says Wrapped 2025

Showing all posts about trends

Spotify listeners shun Australian music says Wrapped 2025

5 December 2025

The suggestion, made by The Daily Aus (TDA), is that few Australians listened to local music in 2025. On Spotify at least.

Zero local acts featured in Australia’s most listened-to artists, tracks, and albums on Spotify in 2025.

You’ll have to go to Instagram (IG) to read the slide card since TDA mainly publish their news reporting on IG, because their target audience, mainly Generation Z and some Millennials, consume news and current affairs reporting on the socials.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the world needs more niche blogs, and TDA, with their fine writing would slot nicely into news and current affairs niche. They do republish articles to their website, but sadly there is no RSS feed to subscribe to.

But back to the headline. I checked my 2025 Spotify Wrapped, and found Moon Motion, by Brisbane based Australian act First Beige (er, Instagram page), was my second most listened to track this year.

Tame Impala, Peking Duk, RÜFÜS DU SOL, and Vera Blue, are among Australian acts on my liked songs playlist. I can’t be the only person in Australia with local acts on their playlist.

It seems surprising to me that not one floated to the top, or at least near it, on the overall most-listened to lists. But maybe it’s some sort of Spotify quirk, and maybe next year we won’t be talking so much about them.

I also learned I have a music listening age of twenty-two (thank-you Spotify), why then all this talk about niche-blogs and RSS feeds? At my “age” I’m meant to be all in the socials.

Neocities, Nekoweb, bringing back the weird personal websites

4 December 2025

Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites.

With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a substantial contribution. Nekoweb was founded last year, but has a growing membership.

Their goals are similar however, says Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

Across both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like anti-AI webrings, a personal website in the style of the ’90s but themed around a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).

Bad design trends: hotel rooms without bathroom doors

2 December 2025

Bring Back Doors. A hopefully growing list of hotels where there are doors to the room’s bathroom.

I’ve emailed hundreds of hotels and I asked them two things: do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass? Everyone that says yes to their doors closing, and no to being made of glass has been sorted by price range and city for you to easily find places to stay that are guaranteed to have a bathroom door.

I’m trying to think how this — hotel rooms without bathroom doors — became a thing.

Did an architect stay at the once sole establishment in the world that did not have bathroom doors in the room, and thought: now there’s an idea, I must incorporate it into my future hotel room designs.

One thing led to another, and suddenly bathrooms sans doors were a trend. A terrible trend.

RELATED CONTENT

design, travel, trends

Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog

1 December 2025

Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website:

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

Presumably, if someone writes a comment, that is actually a post on their blog, in reply to something I’ve written here, I’m notified in some way. Further, I can then allow that comment/blog post to appear as a comment on my website, if I so decide. But there’s nothing new about writing responses to another person’s blog post, on your own blog.

Once upon a time, the only way to “comment” publicly on someone else’s blog post, or rather, an online journal entry, as they were once called, was to write a post on your website in response. This is because early blogs didn’t have commenting facilities. Back then, the tool closest to permitting any sort of on-site public interaction between website writers and visitors, were guestbooks.

But guestbooks — intended really only to allow visitors to leave brief, and usually complimentary messages — were hardly an appropriate forum for discussing blog posts, particularly if these conversations were in-depth and involved numerous participants. But unless a visitor told the writer about their post-in-response, just about the only way a writer might find out was through their referrer logs.

But writing blog posts as comments is a practice that has somewhat been revived by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community. A blogger might respond to this post, on their website, using the title “Re: Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog”. They might also send a pingback, a webmention, or an email, advising me of their blog post.

Being able to reply to blog posts with comments though made for a convenient way to host a centralised discussion about an article, rather than having fragments of it scattered across the web. Centralisation can have some benefits. Readers no longer needed a website to respond to a blog post, and often only had to supply an email address, whether real or not, to air their thoughts.

And so the discussion flowed.

But we all know what happened next. Free-for-all commenting was a boon for spammers. Winer’s blog discourse system would create a hurdle for spammers, who likely would not have a website they could post comments to. Of course, serious comment spammers could setup a blog to publish their spam to, but perhaps the discourse system will have a way for dealing with that.

The blog discourse system also addresses another matter few people give much thought to: comment, and by definition content, ownership. Who “owns” a comment I leave on someone else’s blog? Me, or the website owner? If I append my name, I am identified as the writer — am I not? — and intellectual rights and what not, are mine, even though the publication is not.

Most likely that is the case. Perhaps though, somehow, someone with the same name as me, might claim the comment as theirs, particularly if they see some value in it. I don’t know how often that sort of thing happens, if at all, probably never, or incredibly rarely. But if my comments in reply to other people’s posts are published at my website, and then “syndicated” as an approved comment, the possibility of ownership conflict is removed.

What I wonder about though, is where do the comments I write, which are a response to a post on another person’s blog, end up on my website? Will these be funnelled into a separate content stream? I’m not sure I like the idea of comments intended for other blogs, featuring on the main feed of my blog, amongst my regular posts, even if I did compose the comments.

And will differing content management systems be able to talk each other? For instance will a comment-post made on a WordPress blog, post seamlessly onto, say, a Ghost blog? What of bona fide commenters who do not have blogs? Questions remain to be answered then. But I’m looking forward to finding out more about Winer’s discourse system, and seeing it in action.

AI slop named word of 2025 by Macquarie Dictionary

29 November 2025

The Australian dictionary’s word of the year committee were scathing, to say the least, of their pick:

We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop. Slop in this sense will be a robust addition to English for years to come. The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?

I’d hoped Macquarie Dictionary would make IndieWeb their word for 2025. Enshittification, by the way, was the 2024 word of the year.

Feeds and algorithms have freed us from personal websites

26 November 2025

For another point of view, sorry POV, which I suggest you should read in full, Germany based linguist and writer, Burk:

People stopped typing URLs. Entirely. No one goes to “juliawrites.com” anymore. They go to TikTok. Or Substack. Or Medium. Or Twitter. Or anything that has a feed and an algorithm.

Well most people stopped, obviously. But I still sometimes type “juliawrites.com”. And “TikTok.com/@juliawrites”. Rather than using the TikTok app (yet to install it), so I can see the page of the person I want to, instead of the algorithm serving up what it decides to.

Ditto “Instagram.com”, where the website trumps the app when it comes to user experience any day. I see only what I want to see. And then leave. I seldom go to Substack. I do look in on Twitter sometimes, and Medium, where I have an (unused) account, and read Burk’s article.

I don’t hear too many people saying they like algorithms, at least in a web content context.

But this is the web, and if you want to write something like that on your website, your Substack and/or Medium page, or that algorithm infested swamp that is the socials, you’re free to do so.

As for “forcing” readers to learn the “design quirks” of your personal website, you could always encourage them to subscribe to the RSS feed instead (even if it’s an algorithm-free feed).

Via Michael Gale, whose personal website is here.

Esoteric, speciality, niche blogs closing down, not being replaced

22 November 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch was there. For a good long stretch, there seemingly was a blog (or two or three) dedicated to just about everything. That’s starting to wane. New sites aren’t rising to take the place of retiring ones.

Uni Watch, which has been online in one form or another since 1999, announced its closure a few weeks ago. At first it seemed the entire website, including archived content, was to be removed within days, but in a later post, founder Paul Lukas said the site’s future remained unclear. There’s a suggestion Uni Watch might continue publishing, though that is still far from certain.

The survival of niche interest websites and blogs, such as Uni Watch, are, in my opinion, vital for the future of the web, as I wrote the other day.

It is of course unreasonable to think every owner operated website, or those with a small team of writers, that began publishing decades ago, will keep going forever. What’s unfortunate is the format, niche/speciality blogging, seems to increasingly be regarded as passé.

Niche blogs are just too weird, their presence cannot be tolerated

22 November 2025

Megan Greenwell writing for Talking Points Memo, AKA TPM:

When Vice News stopped publishing in February 2024 — nearly eight years after Gawker’s demise, five after OG Deadspin’s — it marked the final nail in the coffin of the era in which any media outlet was thought of as cool. On one level, that’s for the best; I can think of exactly one Deadspin employee in the site’s history who could accurately be categorized that way. But it also makes clear just how much private equity has taken from us: not just local newspapers providing invaluable information about communities, but also blogs willing to get weird, to try things no one else would.

Ah yes, make one publication profitable by shutting down competing outlets. But this is nothing new.

There were a number of blogs I followed back in the day, fifteen to twenty years ago, pretty much on account of their owners’ — how do I say? — colourful personalities. Many of them ended up being sold, and not long afterwards, ceasing publication.

Surely buyers cannot have gone into the transaction with their eyes closed.

The success of these blogs was, to a large degree, because of their quirkiness. Was the buyer certain they could replicate this ? It made a few people wonder. Back then of course a few blogs going offline was not a problem, plenty more were always coming along. Not so much today though.

Verify the age of adult websites users via their device operating system

22 November 2025

A provider of adult video content — I’ll refrain from naming them, in the hope of stopping network content filters getting upset — is suggesting the age of their audience be verified through the operating system (OS) of their device. Note: the link is to a blog post by the provider, not to any NSFW content. I can’t speak for what happens if you start clicking other links on the page though.

More of these laws are coming, and the safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. However, the best and most effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to identify users at the source: by their device, or account on the device, and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. This means users would only get verified once, through their operating system, not on each age-restricted site. This dramatically reduces privacy risks and creates a very simple process for regulators to enforce.

The idea certainly makes sense, and would save having to go through a separate age verification process on every website, social network, and other online service that requires it.

To date though I don’t recall ever supplying any of the OS’s I use with my date of birth, let alone verifying that information. It seems to me to make age verification possible this way might require some OS suppliers to make changes to allow this.

Update: on checking, I see my date of birth details are entered into my smartphone’s OS, iOS. I expect those details were verified when I obtained my first iPhone, as I needed to present photo identification on signing up with my then phone company.

Assume then my age is verified as far as my smartphone goes. As for my computer OS, Linux Mint, I’m pretty sure I didn’t supply any such info. Couldn’t even be certain I entered my full name. This I will need to check on.

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

20 November 2025

When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful.

In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people prepared to offer definitions of meaningful, and how to write accordingly. It was natural. The web was once awash with all sorts of blogs. Likewise people who wanted to show others how to blog “successfully”.

Again, the definition of successful resided with the individual, but it was obvious this involved monetary return for some people. And why not. If you’re going to invest time and energy in creating a resource that is useful to other people, why shouldn’t you earn money, make a living even, from it?

One of these people blogging about blogging was Melbourne based Australian writer and author Darren Rowse, who launched his blogging resource Problogger in 2004. Without going into detail, because you can look it up for yourself, Rowse, as one of the earlier bloggers about blogging, did, and still does presumably, rather well for himself.

Rowse’s writing, and that of his contributors, attracted numerous readers keen to learn what they could about blogging, and the potential to make money from it.

Problogger is what’s called a niche blog. As a blog about blogging, it has a reasonably singular focus. Some people considered this niche principle to be a core tenet of blogging. There was this idea, in the earlier days of blogging, which possibly still persists, that blogs would do better if they had a speciality. Not only were search engines said to be in favour the approach, but the author of a speciality, or niche blog, would generally be considered to be an expert, of some sort, in their field.

A master of one trade, rather than the proverbial jack of all trades.

Regardless, the world was once full of blogs on every topic imaginable. It was a great time to be alive. If you wanted to learn about something in particular, there was a blog for you. Some publications featured quality content, others required a little fact checking, while some were definitely to be taken with a pinch of salt.

But niche blogging was never a format that suited everyone. There are people who did, still do, well, writing about a range, sometimes a wide range, of topics. Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality. Here, the publication itself is the speciality. To repeat what I wrote in the first sentence of this article: the rules of blogging are few.

But the facets of blogging covered at Problogger, and numerous other similar websites, usually only applied to blogs of a commercial nature. That’s not to say one or two personal bloggers might have looked at the tips posted there for increasing their audience, or improving their writing though. But in my view, personal bloggers were not, are not, part of Problogger’s target audience.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote about Problogger, let alone visited the website, maybe fifteen plus years, but a recent mention of it by Kev Quick, via ldstephens, caught my eye. But I don’t believe Rowse is being critical, in any way, of personal bloggers because they do not adhere to a niche or speciality publishing format. That’s not what Problogger, or Rowse, is about.

But this started me thinking, and writing another of my long posts.

In an age where social media, and influencers, have usurped blogs and their A-List authors, in the jostle for supremacy, it has to be wondered what role websites like Problogger still have. Only a handful of blogs generate liveable incomes today. Despite the doom and gloom though, the form has not completely died off. A backlash against social media, and a growing IndieWeb/SmallWeb community, has precipitated a revival in personal websites.

This is a largely non-commercial movement. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with personal websites. Many of us started out with them in the early days of the web. But the web was not only intended for personal journals. It was a vehicle for sharing all manner of information. The web could also empower individuals, and partnerships, to not only set up shop online, be that blogs, or quite literally shops, but potentially make a living at the same time.

But with the revival of personal blogs well underway, I think it’s time to bring niche blogs back into the fold. I’m talking about well written, quality, topic focused resources. This is material fast vanishing from the web, leaving ever diminishing options to source useful and accurate information. What are the alternatives? The misinformation morass that is social media? Being served AI generated summaries in response to search engine queries? A web choke full of AI slop?

At the same time, I’m not advocating for a return of niche blogs plastered with adverts, and popup boxes urging visitors to subscribe to say a newsletter, before they’ve even had a chance to blink at what they came to read.

I’m talking about work produced by independent writers, with an interest in their subject matter, who are not backed by large media organisations, or private equity. This is bringing back reliable sources of information, that also recompenses the content writers in some way. Hopefully we’ve learned a few lessons about monetisation since the earlier wave of niche blogging. We know it is possible to generate revenue without compromising the reader experience.

A resurgence in personal blogging is the first step in rebuilding a vibrant, thriving, web, or if you like, blogosphere. Now the focus needs to be on restoring the flow of accessible and trusted information.

« older posts