Duncan Riley

Born in Sydney, Australia, Riley is a pioneer in Australian politics on the internet, creating the first website for a political party branch in Australia in 1995, and going on later that year to write the now defunct Australian Conservative Politics portal, the first conservative aggregate political site in Australia.

In 1999, he designed and ran the website Young Australians Against this Republic, in conjunction with a number of political and social groups within Australia.

In 2002, he launched The Blog Herald, the first blog dedicated to the news of the then still small blogging world. The site went on to become a Technorati Top 100 blog and covered major milestones in the blogging industry, including the growth of Gawker Media and the founding of Weblogs Inc. Riley sold the site in January 2006.

In 2005, he launched weblog network Weblog Empire, which later was merged into blogging network b5media, a company founded by Riley along with Bloggers Darren Rowse and Jeremy Wright. b5media took $2 million in venture capital in 2006. In late 2006, Riley left b5media to pursue personal projects.

In May 2008, Riley completed a 12 month stint as a writer at TechCrunch, regarded as the bible of Web 2.0 and the second most popular blog in the world according to Technorati. On 5 May 2008 he lauched The Inquisitr, a blog that offers a mix of tech news, pop culture, and funny/ odd stories. As of July 2008 the site was a top 5000 blog worldwide according to Technorati.