Did someone say we’re hyperconnected? Oh yeah, Mark Pesce did last week. And you know what? He did a keynote presentation at a conference this morning and someone’s blogged about it before he’d even left the room. And now I’ve blogged about the blog. And he still hasn’t left the room.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2008.
As I write this, Twitter is down for a “database replication catchup”. Sounds technical. As I hinted before, and as Kate Carruthers agrees, it’s make or break time for this most cool of messaging services.
It’s ironic that Twitter’s ability to connect us humans into an almost-instantaneous global network was a core theme of Mark Pesce’s keynote presentation at Microsoft’s ReMIX 08 last week. The very week he extols Twitter’s strengths, it collapses. And they don’t know why.
At least Twitter has responded to community calls for more transparency.
In Twittering About Architecture, Alex Payne admits they built it wrong from the beginning.
Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability.
I don’t need to repeat my call for less haste in web development — and in the world generally — do I?
Twitter has just received another $15M investment. Take the time to get it right, guys. But quickly.
Only hours to go! Eurovision at the Pub is tonight at our local “Irish” pub, Kelly’s On King, 258 King Street, Newtown. The SBS broadcast starts at 7.30pm, but we’ll be there from 5pm or so to, um, ensure sufficient fuel for a long evening of big hair, tacky costumes and dodgy choreography.
There’s a Facebook event page, but even if you don’t use Facebook please RSVP here or to my Twitter stream or somehow. The more confirmed guests, the more free stuff the pub gives us.
I’ll be Twittering the event, as will many others, with the tag #eurovision. If I have enough bandwidth, I’ll also provide an audio commentary via Ustream.
Stilgherrian’s links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008, collected almost-automatically…
[Note: This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for Crikey this morning. The main difference is a bit more linkage. There's more CeBIT / Transaction 2.0 material to come.]
In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave. Following the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, he said, we’re now experiencing the Third Wave, or what might be called post-industrial society. Australia’s surfing prowess means nothing here, though. We’re still pissing in the shallows, barely held up by leaking floaties.
Why is tech-literate, well-educated Australia so bad at marketing and profiting from its own innovation, from the fisheye lens to gene shears? We do innovate, you know.
“Australians expect the government to do everything for them — but the government’s clueless,” explained journalist and evangelist Duncan Riley at yesterday’s Transaction 2.0 conference. “The Australia 2020 Summit is a classic example. The Internet was seen as an ‘emerging’ industry. Emerging? We’ve had it for 20 years! In the US alone it employs 7 million people.”
For better or for worse, episode 3 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha is online over at Ustream. I did rant at the camera as threatened. I went for 45 minutes instead of 25 to 30 because I was looking at the wrong clock. I have destroyed my personal brand forever. Chat logs to be reviewed later.
By tonight I’ll be exhausted after 3 days of geekery. If the nice long cough I just had is any indication, I’ll be feeling ratty for other reasons too. Nevertheless, episode 3 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha will be on the Internet at 9.30pm Sydney time — no matter how ill-prepared, no matter how ill. I suspect that the worse I feel, the snarkier I’ll get. There will also be embarrassing videos.
I’ve written previously that the Federal Budget sort of explained what’ll be happening with Internet filtering. Now that Senator Conroy has announced his Cyber-Safety Consultative Working Group I’m not so sure.
As Michael Meloni says over at Somebody Think of the Children:
When you consider people like Anthony Pillion, manager of filtered Australian ISP Webshield, and Child Wise CEO Bernadette McMenamin are on board, the odds of mandatory filtering being found a good solution are disappointingly high.
Pillion has a business interest and for McMenamin the gesture alone of protecting children is better then doing nothing, even if it has no chance of working. Here’s part of her letter to Stilgherrian:
If filtering of child pornography cannot work then why is there so much anger, fear and resentment to any attempt to block child pornography and other illegal sites?
[...]
Thankfully, the group does contain at least two people opposed to mandatory filtering: Sue Hutley from the Australian Library and Information Association (who asked Conroy questions about his plan that we all want answered and is opposed to filtering in public libraries) and Peter Coroneos from the IIA.
I’ve written plenty about censorship before. so while I’m busy at CeBIT‘s Transaction 2.0 today, feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves. Play nice. I’ll ponder it in more detail later.
I’ve been Twittering fairly extensively from ReMIX 08. While it’s easy enough to follow my Twitter feed, you can get a mix of everyone’s tweets from the conference at hashtags.org or Twemes. The second one has all of my tweets.
Tomorrow is the first day of my three geek-intensive days this week: Microsoft ReMIX 08, where they’ll be pimping their new technologies for making web stuff. I now have a plan!
I won’t copy what mainstream media folks do: either puff pieces extolling the wond’rousness of all things Microsoft or stories about how someone else did the same thing years ago, depending on how much of their advertising comes from Microsoft. Instead, I’ll see what I can learn from the assembled geeks about the state of their world — vox pops of some kind.
I’ve also booked a one-on-one interview with Tim Aidlin, a “Design Evangelist” in Microsoft’s Web Innovations Team. But rather than focussing on Microsoft’s new geek tools I’ll be exploring his worldview.
I’ve borrowed a Canon HV20 digital video camera for the week (thanks Garth!) so you’ll see at least some of the results on Thursday night’s Stilgherrian Live Alpha. Everything will be put online in some form, eventually.
For live updates during the conference, follow my Twitter feed.
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