Dion cedes his own crown

If our more active online readers had been perched on the walls of the Stab office yesterday, they may have had difficulty administering keystrokes. Dion Agius entered wearing torn-up cut-off jeans, a black tee with a scooped-out neck and with a copy of German lifestyle magazine Butt in his fist. The great thing about Dion is that he doesn’t claim to be anything. He does his thing, knows the rules of the game, and it enrages a certain furious demographic.

Until just two months ago, his blog was the biggest in the biz. It drew more traffic than Fanning, Parko, the Goods. Then along came Dane.

Stab: They’re some relatively crude methods we used but it looks like Dane may have just taken your crown of the most visited surfer’s blog? Dion Agius: The thing is fucked up. He’s so fucken good it’s ridiculous. I was talking to him about it a few months ago and he was saying, I’m just gonna put up everything. Every good clip. I guess it doesn’t matter for him, he can get a section in a movie in two sessions anyway. Can you imagine if he got all his best waves and made a section since he started that blog. It would blow your mind. He had a site but he used to hate it. He had this plan to make the raddest little site and I bet that’s exactly how he envisioned it.

How hard was it watching other blogs starting after yours started to take off? In all honesty, cause it pissed me off because so many people are doing it, I just wanted to stop doing it but it’s such an integral part of what I do. When I started the response wasn’t that big but then it started getting momentum. For me, it’s done wonders. It wasn’t my idea

Who was the next to follow? Brett Simpson, I think. Just with these little videos.

Has Dane’s site changed the way you want to do things? Is Dion Agius gonna start a campaign of wild self-promotion? Nah, I don’t wanna be a self-promotional dickhead. I haven’t been abused yet. I thought people would be freaking that my videos weren’t good enough after seeing Dane’s. The thing about my site that makes it work is that it’s more than just surfing. My two most watched videos haven’t even had surfing in them. When I was a grom I wanted to see the behind-the-scenes stuff. I can’t surf anything like Dane. I’m not nearly as good at partying as Fisher. I’m something else.

What do you love about the net? Everyone has their voice. The days of surf mags being happy families with all the surfers and licking their asses have changed now. It’s more real.

Which surfer would you like to see make a site? I’d love to see Ozzie do one. That would be fucken all-time, I don’t even know whether he uses computers but the coolest blogs are the ones where people just throw whatever up. You can find someone who has the same style as you and you can latch onto their things, steal their things and re-upload it for the surf world. You find someone’s site and it’s really a window into their soul. If you’re a vanilla motherfucker, it’s boring as fuck. That’s why Dane is so good. And, I wouldn’t even bother with most surf sites. Mick just won another contest, oh-I’m-in-Brazil-and-the-waves-suck, my dog just had kittens or some shit.  – Sam McIntosh.