Starting today Drive.com.au will be the sales team for CarsGuide.  This is a distribution deal meaning that dealerships will now be able to have a single point of contact for both sites. This isn’t a merger in any sense, both Drive & CarsGuide will continue to operate as separate sites in a competitive environment, with their own editorial, marketing and technical teams.

What it does mean is that both sites will grow as dealers will now be listed on both sites. From the press release this morning:

"This initiative presents significant commercial benefits to new and used vehicle dealers, allowing them to reach potential buyers more easily across two national platforms," Jack Matthews, CEO, Fairfax Digital said. "The personalised account service and expanded offerings resulting from this agreement will streamline the marketing process for dealers."

"We are committed to providing quality leads to dealers from online car buyers across Australia. This agreement reflects our ongoing commitment to increase our customers’ operational efficiencies," he said.

Under this agreement Dealers will benefit by advertising their vehicles with the two largest media organisations in Australia. The combined reach of both platforms coupled with the experience and knowledge of the advertising needs of the motoring industry ensure an offering of immense value to Dealerships nationally.

Furthermore, Dealers will have one Account Manager dedicated to managing all online vehicle listings with both Drive.com.au and Carsguide.com.au.

I’m pretty sure this is an unprecedented move in the online classifieds space in Australia. It’s not just that Drive & CarsGuide are competitors in the online automotive space, but the parent companies - Fairfax & News Ltd. are the two major media competitors in Australia, and traditionally don’t co-operate.  It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.

You can see a video of the announcement here.

(Disclosure: I work for Drive.com.au.  I generally don’t post about work, but this is public news anyway.)

NewsGator has announced that they are offering their client software products as free software.  This includes FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  Also, the new version of FeedDemon (2.6) has been released.

This is quite a big deal.  FeedDemon is an awesome piece of software, and the synchronisation tool (also free) makes it invaluable for people who use it at home and at work.  Nick Bradbury has assured everyone that this doesn’t mean that development is going to stall now:

"Is this some sneaky ploy to stop development of FeedDemon and your other consumer products?"

Good lord, no.  I realize that some companies have made their software free as a first step towards dumping it entirely, but that’s not the case here.  If it was, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post - I’d be bitching at the top of my lungs in some bar somewhere.

This is a major investment on our part.  If anything, the pace of development will only get faster.  NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker goes into this further, but basically, there are two reasons we’re doing this crazy thing.

You need to download FeedDemon now!  I don’t care what other RSS reader you use, this one is better. The only reason I could conceive before now not to use it was the cost, but seeing as that’s now no longer an issue, everyone needs to use FeedDemon.  There are so many features, I’ve mentioned plenty before (see here).

Download, it’s what all the cool kids are doing!

Get it while it’s hot.  List of changes on that page.

I’ll back the first one straight out of the box, updating and synchronising is way faster, almost instantaneous in some cases. Seems to start up faster too.  Adding the Find Feeds option into the file menu is a nice touch for those who didn’t do it on install but now want to see what else is out there.

It just one more thing I love about FeedDemon; almost every minor release or release candidate has a new feature in it that users have requested, unlike most software where it’s just ‘invisible bug fix x fixed‘.

The Glue Society, the creative agency that came up with the great molten ice-cream van for last years’ Sculpture By the Sea, has produced a series of 4 photographs depicting biblical scenes from the perspective of a Satellite photo called God’s Eye View.  The photos depict the garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark as the waters begin to recede, the parting of the Red Sea & the crucifixion of Jesus.  This is the same creative agency that did the ‘no-one thinks big of you‘ campaign for the RTA and the Chaser’s international billboard campaign.

Glue Society’s creative director Jonathan Kneebone, not one to shy away from controversy, has said that 

God’s Eye View was not intended to be a theological statement. "Art has always depicted religious events and this is simply a new way to do it," he said. "We’re playing with the whole idea that if you can capture something from a satellite it must exist."

The images are really quite impressive, constructed from multiple images as they are.  For example the sides of the pulled-back red sea are actually shots of Niagara Falls & some of the Garden of Eden is constructed from shots in Belgium (does that make Belgium Heaven on earth?)

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From auDA:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator, today announced the 1 millionth .au domain name had been registered.

"We are pleased to announce that the 1 millionth .au domain registration is elite-finance.com.au" said Chris Disspain, auDA’s CEO. "We congratulate the Registrant of elite-finance.com.au for being part of this momentous occasion."

Adrian Kinderis, Managing Director of AusRegistry, the Registry Operator and wholesale provider for all commercial and non-commercial .au domain names concurs, "We too offer our congratulations, 1 million .au domains is a huge achievement for the .au namespace and for Australian internet users. It was only 5 years ago the tally was close to 250,000."

You really don’t see the growth in domain names that you see in other countries, especially the US, due to auDA’s very strict registration policies.  This is either a good thing or  a bad thing depending on your perspective.  Doubling in size in 5 years isn’t exactly amazing growth, but given the regulation of the market, it is a positive sign.

I’d like to see some data on the breakdown of those domains, what type of domains (com.au, net.au, org.au, etc.), what’s the actual growth rate & is it increasing or decreasing. That would give us a better picture of how the market is going.

Despite their claims to the contrary, the market never lies