I’m a few days late with this post due to internet problems but give or take a week I don’t really think the blog is going to mind.

It’s been an interesting year for me writing for this website. I started off with absolutely nothing. I had no web presence under OzSoapbox and started from scratch.

In just one year I’ve attempted to take OzSoapbox from internet nothingness into what I believe is a decent sized blog.

For my first year review I decided to take a look back and share where the last 12 months of blogging has taken me.




1. The beginning

The first post on OzSoapbox, ”Hassan Bakr: Judge rules 40 cyclists’ lives worth only $1200” went live on the 28th January, 2009. At that stage OzSoapbox was running on Godaddy’s ‘Quick Blogcast’ platform and looked something like this (click to enlarge):

A few months later I switched over to WordPress. The design you see today on OzSoapbox is the result of more then a few hours of mashing together various designs and functionality from various themes.

Not knowing jack about php this was quite the challenge but the end result is both useful and functional so I think it was worth it.

I’m a big fan of if it’s not broken don’t fix it so for now I don’t foresee any major changes to the design template.




2. Liberty League and Polaris

Without a doubt the most sought after, commented on and widely read articles on OzSoapbox this year has been both the coverage and my own penned thoughts on Liberty League (now Polaris Media Group).

I started writing about the company after seeing an advertisement on television for one of the company’s co-ops, ‘Six Figure Chicks’.

Seeing as the advertisement didn’t really tell me anything I did a bit of research myself and decided to publish my opinion.

Over the next few months I followed Polaris Media Group and discussion raged about the validity of the business. A critical point in this discussion was the NSW government going public with it’s belief the company was a pyramid scheme.

This was somewhat of an important moment for me as it was the first time what I’d written about had effected events occurring offline. I still don’t really know if the NSW Office of Fair Trading planned to release their May findings regardless of what I’d written. To me it will always seems strangely co-incidental that they chose to release their four month old not publicly disclosed findings two days after I went public with them.

Pre-empting the announcement (I don’t know if DoFT had released the findings to the company before the public or not), Liberty League had already set itself up to rebadge as Polaris Media Group in an attempt to distance itself from any bad press associated with the old name.

A few months after that came proof of something completely out of left field, that a lot of the upper management of Polaris were involved in Scientology.

This came as a complete surprise to me and I suspect I wasn’t alone. The timing couldn’t have been better as it happened right in the middle of a push for a parliamentary enquiry into the legality of the religion.

Writing about Liberty League and Polaris taught me a few things about blogging. First and foremost that if you write about a topic people are passionate about and they disagree with you, that they will strike hard and fast to discredit you.

I guess the proof is there in itself that information is only effective and believable as people make it. I try to put as much research in as possible when writing about topics and I think proof of this is in the circulation and popularity of the material written itself.

People as massively skeptical these days so you really can’t get away with half arsed analysis or arguments. Sure nothing is stopping you from doing so but if it’s credibility you’re after you won’t last long if you’re just spinning bullshit from the get go.




3. Debuting on Russian News Network Zvezda

One of the more surreal experiences I had in my first year of OzSoapbox was the invitation to feature on Russian news network, Zvezda.

Broadcast to over 1,300 Russian cities, late last year  I was invited by one of the producers to do a short 30 second commentary on recent bushfires in New South Wales.





Seeing myself on the Russian news was quite the out of body experience for me and certainly one of the highlights of writing for OzSoapbox.




4. Death threats, blackmail and legal threats

My mother once said to me words to the effect of ‘if you’re not being sued then you’re not doing a good enough job writing’.

I don’t know if legal threats are purely the result of the topics I write about, how I choose to write about them or if they just simply comes with the turf of blogging.

Whatever the reason though, thus far I’ve had several legal threats made against me this past year. Not surprisingly the bulk of which were related to my articles on Polaris Media Group.

To their credit Polaris Media Group as a company hasn’t launched any action against me. Instead the threats have come from various distributors and people associated with the company. For the most part they’ve been half arsed and appropriately ignored.




5. Website traffic and reader participation

I don’t really have a gauge for this other then knowing that some websites get a few million visitors a month/day. For my first year running a website I’m pretty happy with my traffic results and reader participation.

In the 12 months since I started it, OzSoapbox has been accessed over 320,000 times and reader participation currently stands at over 5,100 comments.

My own comments are included in that number but I like to think of feedback as a whole.




6. Where to from here?

When I started OzSoapbox I decided I’d give it my best for two years and see how I felt about the site. Currently I’m still happy with this strategy and plan to stick to it.

One year in I feel like I’ve really been progressing as a writer and hopefully some of that reflects back in the articles you read.

Just in case you’re new to the site (I will update the about page eventually), I also found myself moving from Australia to Taiwan late last year. Keeping the blog going during this transition has brought about it’s own challenges but I seem to have settled on a schedule I can follow comfortably.

My biggest problem at the moment is the lack of reliable internet at home. My whole building shares the same internet connection and I’m unable to get my own hookup.

The only option at this stage is to move out in a few months and make internet connection a higher priority when choosing a place to live. In the meantime I have written a few pieces on current events,  but regular readers have no doubt noticed I’ve been focusing mostly on articles that can be written at home and later uploaded.

Due to this I don’t think I’m going to have a topic as large or time consuming to research as covering Liberty League but I hope that the site will continue to grow.

I certainly hope to refine my voice and with the whole of Taiwan to explore I don’t think I’m going to run short of content anytime soon.

As always my journey doesn’t really mean much if I can’t share it with people so I’d like to thank everyone who’s participated on here, has read OzSoapbox and/or continues to read OzSoapbox.

If you asked me what this post was going to contain a year ago I’d have not even come close to describing the experience, for better or worse, that I’ve had.

Here’s to the next 12 months, cheers.

Related posts that might interest you:

1. Polaris Media Group Advisor threatens to sue OzSoapbox
2. Is there enough demand for a separate new MLM blog?
3. Answering some questions on Polaris Media Group
4. If the EMC can’t sell Polaris, how can distributors?
5. Liberty League a scam in Oz, Polaris Media Group next?