One of the strange things about blogging is that it leads you into an amazing variety of relationships that you would never have dreamed of finding yourself in before. Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I think about the people that I’ve ‘met’ and have daily contact with as a result of my blogs. My friends are staggered (as am I) that I’m actually in a business partnership with 3 other people that I’ve never physically met before in b5media and that I have similar relationships with numerous other people. Add to this the 40,000+ other people that read my blogs each day and it all makes my head hurt a little to think about.

On the flip side of all of the plus sides of this is the fact that I live on the opposite side of the world to the vast majority of you reading this right now. While I love Australia and the lifestyle of Melbourne it can be very frustrating not to be able to have a coffee and get to know people on a face to face level.

As a result I’ve been wanting to get across to the US (where the majority of ProBlogger readers live) for some time now to put some faces to names and now it looks like there is an opportunity for a short visit opening up later in the year.

While part of the trip I’ll be on a conference I’m hoping to have a week available either before or after it to dedicate to spending time with readers and partners.

I’d like to float an idea by those of you in the US to see if it has any traction for anyone.

Andy Wibbels and I have been dreaming of doing a live face to face course similar in style to SixFigureBlogging for a while now and we’re thinking that this might be an opportunity to do so.

We’ve started brainstorming on what it’d look like and here’s what we’re thinking so far:

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Voting for this year’s Bloggies Annual Weblog Awards is open.

Check out the best web development weblog section for some great blogs – including a little one called ProBlogger.

Of course 50% of you detest blog awards so you’re excused from voting ;-)

I’ve been a little hesitant to talk about this on ProBlogger but in the last two hours I’ve had 30 emails about it so thought rather than responding to each one personally I should make a statement before things go much further.

The story is that a blog called AmBlogger.net has started a blog that until I woke up this morning looked virtually exactly like ProBlogger.net (except what you see here as Orange was blue, some names were changed and there were a few poorly formatted bits and pieces).

If you go have a look now you’ll notice that Vince Chan the blogger concerned has now deleted the three menu boxes at the top of the blog so it is a little different – but the similarities are pretty obvious. update: You can see a screen cap here of his design (now changed) after the three boxes were deleted.

I saw this blog a few days ago and shot Vince Chan an email raising my concern. I didn’t demand he stop using the design but made it clear I was not happy with it. Previously when people have stolen designs from me an email like this has been replied to with an apology and a commitment to change the blog design immediately.

In this case no apology was forthcoming and Vince replied with an email saying he didn’t have time to reply adequately at that time but that he’d come back to me within 48 hours. His response came within that time but rather that coming via email it appeared on his blog with an excerpt from my email to him.

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