I'm very sorry to hear that Charles.

You have put an amazing amount of work into bleedingedge and we all love it very much. The IT industry is mad not to advertise with you - but c'est la vie, there's no point arguing.

I wish you all the best with your Scooter site and hope to see you get re-unthused here some time.

regards

Chris

Charles

I don't believe it... you actually are relying on this blog for a living?

To be brutually honest, I think a pure blog in australia is unviable.

Can I recommend aligning your blog with The Age or some other site? The Age's blog are pretty average yet they get enough traffic on the site. It'll cut your costs down too...

Be practical charles... (sorry!!! I mean well!)

starting a blog with a more targetted topic that is product related is a wise move. Of course it's going to be a long term affair as a new blog takes 12 months or so to establish itself and build a readership (if you write the type of stuff people want).

All the best with it.

PS: Sumit - "To be brutually honest, I think a pure blog in australia is unviable." - you'd be surprised how many Australians are now making a living with their blogs. There are not heaps of us but it's more of a viable reality than you might think.

Charles was aligned with "The Age", Sumit. "Razer" bopped along nicely for some time. But the tight-wads their made it uneconomic for him, as I recall.

I think he realises that blogs are more pastimes than money making. That's possibly why we are hearing less and less from him. Pity that. But perfectly understandable

Charles,

this is a regrettable loss to our IT publishing industry - but one that is understandable.

Perhaps a new model might be you as editor, with articles by invitation and columns by trusted authors? You seem to be heading down this path - by chance or design is unclear.

I wish I was in a position to help more.

Over at the forum, Stephen has done a private ask around for those who might be interested in a Vista Demo Day with Microsoft input. The one person who hasn't responded is Charles.

I don't mean any disrespect or anything, but we need to see a little more of the number one guy out and about, you know?

Hey Newman. A polite inquiry tends to get a better reception than a whinge. The reason I haven't responded is that I haven't seen the private ask-around. Where is it?

Through private messages and emails. Check your inbox :)

Yeah. Right. Nothing in the Inbox. No private messages.

Hmmm. Long time no post (for me).

I recently attended a blog forum (at a conference) hosted by three very sucessful bloggers.

One blogs on the print media. One blogs on film. One blogs on society trends.

Couldn't be more different, and yet all said the same thing about their "bootstrap event" that took them from "just another blog" to 20,000 unique visitors a day, and that was the least popular of the three.

For each of their blogs, the bootstrap event involved sex, and a lot of people googleing for something that had nothing to do with their actual content, finding out they had something worthwhile to say, and coming back.

For the media blogger, it was a story about a newspaper story about transsexuals in China. For the film blogger, it was a story about an actress who'd gotten into some "trouble". For the society blogger, it was a story about an Eastern European call-girl website that had been shut down.

The message? It takes incredible luck, sex, a high google page-rank, and a lot of incorrect linking to get a blog over the line financially.

Unless you start posting about Australian cybersex, teledildonics, or posting pictures of yourself nude Charles, I don't see how a blog like this will ever make money.

Your other difficulty is that, quite frankly, in the "IT industry curmudgeon" category, there are other, better funded, better designed blogs out there. One can find the same "quality" of comments on slashdot, covering pretty much all the same stories.

None of this is a personal attack! When you left the SMH fold (prematurely, I thought -- their blogs are just now gaining traction) I wondered how long you'd have the energy for this.

I wish you luck in whatever you chose to redirect your energies into.