September 2009

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“Do Journos Do it Better?”

30 September 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

The reprobates in the photo are me and my fellow panellists at forthcoming the Media140 Sydney conference, where we’ve been given the topic “Do Journos Do it Better? Journalists in SocMedia Communities.” Look out, folks!

From left to right, that’s freelance journalist, columnist and blogger Mia Freedman; new media consultant and recovering journalist Bronwen Clune; Valerio Veo, who heads up online news and current affairs at SBS; social media consultant Laurel Papworth; and me.

Now I’m hoping the discussion doesn’t degenerate back into those tedious bloggers versus journalists arguments from last year. Certainly by year’s end they seemed to have faded. And we do seem to have a more switched-on panel. But we’ll see.

Actually the full conference program looks good, with everyone from ABC managing director Mark Scott and Crikey editor Jonathan Green to… oh, look for yourself.

Media140 Sydney is on 5 and 6 November 2009 at the ABC’s Eugene Goossens’ Hall in Ultimo. Early-bird bookings at $145 ~~close today~~ have been extended to 5 October.

Links for 29 September 2009 through 30 September 2009

30 September 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 29 September 2009 through 30 September 2009, published with very little care whatsoever:

jQuery Carousel: This is the code that Jeff Waugh used for the rotating carousel of featured stories on the Crikey home page. He reckons he wouldn’t necessarily use it again. But this is my bookmark.
Online Database of Social Media Policies | Social Media Governance: A collection of (currently) more than 100 corporate policies relating to social media.
Is transparency the new objectivity? 2 visions of journos on social media | Nieman Journalism Lab: One of the more interesting discussions following the Washington Post‘s imposition of new, restrictive social media guidelines for its staff.
Against Journalistic “Balance” | Grits for Breakfast: This piece from 2008 covers many of the reasons I consider journalistic “objectivity” to be a myth.
The Eggcorn Database: An eggcorn is an accidental word, intended to be something else. The original “eggcorn” was meant to be “acorn”.
The Body In Question | YouTube: Jonathan MIller’s remarkable 13-part BBC television series on medicine from 1978. The encoding isn’t the best, but his wit and style come through. I’ve watched two episodes so far. In the second, I was intrigued to see an appendectomy being done using traditional surgery, rather than keyhole.
If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers | Digital Survivors: Although written as satire, this does precisely describe the unrealistic expectations that many clients put onto their web designers and developers.

Talking Government 2.0 on Radio National

28 September 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Further to my appearance on Radio National’s Future Tense talking Telstra and corporate transparency, last week a little more of my recorded interview was used in their program on Participatory democracy, Web 2.0 and the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

My main point was that people will expect the Government 2.0 Taskforce to do a lot of things — especially given their massive brief — and yet they’ll be disbanded at the end of the year.

There are going to be expectations that there’ll be something really significant to put on the table by Christmas, and yet it’s all uncertain. The uncertainties in all this are incredible. We’re expecting this group of people to essentially solve all of the problems of government 2.0 and have this grand road map in just a few months. It’s an enormous bullet point list of stuff that they’ve got to achieve. And now that people are starting to look at it, they’re realising we’re only at the very early stages of people starting to agree on what the questions might mean, let alone what the answers might look at. And my gut feeling is people are starting to be a bit hesitant about ‘Hey, are we actually going to get something of value at the end of this, or is it just another of the Rudd government’s talkfests to make it look like we’ve got something happening but there’s no real end result?’ I mean the Australia 2020 Summit, did we ever get anything really concrete out of that?

Duncan Riley essentially agreed. But I found the response from Nicholas Gruen, who chairs the Taskforce, interesting.

Gruen says that unlike most government inquiries — and he’s been on eight — this time the recommendations aren’t the important thing. It’s more about educating everyone — including the public service and politicians.

Click through to the program for the full transcript or, for a limited time at least, to listen to the podcast.

Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!

27 September 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 6 comments

Stilgherrian – Risk vs paranoia from Penny Sharpe on Vimeo.

Penny Sharpe MLC asked me to say something controversial at her NSW Sphere event back on 4 September. Here it is. The full video and transcript (below) of my somewhat rambling discussion of the challenges facing the Government 2.0 revolution.

Hi. I’m Stilgherrian, and I’m avoiding the whole projection thing today.

My presentation, the long name was “Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!”, and I just want to spend a few minutes throwing in some ideas which might trigger some discussion point around those, those words.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is this viral marketing? And whither Stilgherrian Live?

26 September 2009 in Marketing, Stilgherrian Live by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

“I almost laughed in the dunny. Props on your viral marketing,” said Dan Animal when he originally posted this photo.

Taken in the men’s toilet at The Clare Hotel on Broadway, Sydney, it shows a sticker reading “Cnut” to which someone’s added “Still Gherrian Live” [sic]. Is it my marketing? Nah, I’d at least have spelled my own name right. And, as Dan noted, I’d have included a web address too.

Now what’s actually happening with Stilgherrian Live, you might ask?

To be honest, I’m not sure. I haven’t been enjoying doing the program as much lately, and it does take up a bunch of time. I want to do something, but I’m not sure what. There is a certain… malaise. Perhaps you have some ideas?

Smartphones as sexual display

26 September 2009 in Human Nature, Internet by Stilgherrian | 9 comments

On one of my recent visits to NSW Parliament House on Macquarie Street the security guard who X-rayed my bag noted that while it contained plenty of Apple kit, such as my MacBook Pro, I carried a Nokia phone rather than an iPhone. “That’s because I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid,” I replied. “Plus they’re all just tools for a job.”

Many people do seem to choose their devices more through brand identity than practical value. I was going to write more about that, but that renowned bastard Stephen Fry has beaten me to it. It’s all about sexual display.

When two businessmen drop down in neighbouring aeroplane seats and each gets out a smartphone an electricity will crackle between them like that between two sexually heated adolescents whose thighs have accidentally touched in the backseat of the school bus. If one businessman fishes from his shirt pocket a BlackBerry while the other gets out an iPhone a whole range of complex thoughts will begin to boil in the brains of each: resentment, contempt, insecurity and irritation are merely the emotions bubbling closest to the surface: deep down, dark and primal forces stir. We do not possess antlers, horns or tusks, we cannot display fans of feather or manes of fur, the best we can do is express our personality, aspirations, beliefs, outlook, sexual potency, status, right to breed and place in the hierarchy through the choices we make in our possessions: and no possession, here in the early part of the twenty-first century, speaks quite so loudly as our smartphone. Once upon a time it was our motorcar and in the future it may well be a robot, a rocket-pack or a hoverpenis that defines us, but for the moment it is, for good or ill, a smartphone.

Many women reading this will detect that the foregoing is an issue almost entirely for males, who remain the prime sufferers in this kind of tribal status war. My suspicion is that women are, if not immune, far less emotionally bound up in the business than men. I may be wrong and welcome clarification either way on this point.

I do realise that quoting Stephen Fry doesn’t make up for writing an original piece, but at least it means I’m trying to keep up to date with my writing.

Links for 22 September 2009 through 26 September 2009

26 September 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 September 2009 through 26 September 2009, gathered intermittently and posted with a lack of attention to detail:

How Twitter works in theory | Epeus’ epigone: There is much in this commentary of Twitter which I support, particularly the concepts of flow and the overlapping social networks. Read and learn.
Industry cooperation looming on filtering? | CommsDay: There have been rumours, from reliable sources, that Senator Conroy is hoping Australia’s Internet industry will come up with its own answer to censorship.
Dear Associated Press: Come On, Attribution is Not That Hard | Whatever: John Scalzi is annoyed that AP cited him as “another user” on Twitter, when his name is just a click away. This fits with something I hinted at in Crikey this week. More about that another time.
How journalists and media brands can get the maximum benefit from Twitter | Write, edit, blog: A nice collection of thoughts about… well, what the title says.
Public Radio Exchange: “An online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming.” Free registration means you can listen to this stuff yourself. Hours and hours of it.
Programmatic specificity: what is Rudd talking about? | En Passant: An earlier essay, from July, with another take on Ruddspeak.
Rudd's robust language is not the problem | Woolly Days: A nice analysis of why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd using the f-word really of little consequence, whereas bureaucratic evasiveness like “detailed programmatic specificity” is.
Caring for Your Introvert | The Atlantic (March 2003): An oldie but a goodie. Kind of. If you’re an introvert, it might be worth showing this to those extroverts who are pissing you off.
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google: All of the photos from LIFE magazine from 1936 to 1972 are on Google Images. This isn’t new — the archive was created in 2008 — but I was reminded of it this week.
WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin | OMNINOGGIN: A different message is displayed to blog visitors, depending on how they found you. Do I have a use for this, or it it just another annoyance to maintain?
Is the Internet melting our brains? | Salon Books: Despite the provocative headline, this interview with linguist Dennis Baron from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a sensible debunking of the fears.
The Interregnum Revisited | Jon Taplin’ Blog: This essay deserves slow and careful reading. It links the themes of the cyclic nature of right-wing fear-mongering and paranoia with longer-term US political history — with some disturbing conclusions.
Can Sheepdogs Round Up Magpies? | BitingTheDust: A great story from Robbo, currently in the Gibson Desert. And a great photo.
MacSpeech Dictate 1.5: I’d been meaning to find decent dictation software for OS X, and John Birmingham mentioned this one. Must check it out.
Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003 | WebSiteOptimization.com: Web pages now average more than 300KB and 50 objects per page. I know my own attitude has been that everyone now has broadband. But what about mobile devices and the Third World?

Empty remnants of John Howard

21 September 2009 in History, Photography, Politics, Sydney by Stilgherrian | 7 comments

Yesterday ’Pong and I journeyed to Epping in Sydney’s north-west suburbs to photograph this monument to history: John Howard’s campaign office for the 2007 federal election. It’s still empty almost two years later.

Epping seemed strangely bleak. This was far from being the only empty shop on Beecroft Road. Signs were dilapidated. In the alley behind the shops, magpies rummaged through restaurant garbage bins in search of food. The eucalypt smoke enshrouding the suburb — the result of back-burning operation before summer — didn’t help.

Two years ago posts referencing John Howard dominated this website’s tag cloud. It’s been a long time since he was Prime Minister, but he’s still prominent here and in the mainstream media through things like his Menzies Lecture — and that was a strange attempt to stamp his own rhetoric onto Australia’s political history.

I wonder how long it’ll be until we stop hearing about the miserable old toad?

Talking Telstra and transparency on Radio National

21 September 2009 in Internet, Marketing, Politics, Transparency by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

Telstra logo

My world was dominated by Telstra last week. Apart from my writing and a radio spot about the government’s plans to split the telco, I also spoke on ABC Radio National’s Future Tense on Thursday about the sudden closure of their nowwearetalking blog.

I’d already written about that shutdown here and over at Crikey. However the Radio National conversation was in the more general context of how social media is affecting corporate transparency.

You can listen to the program (at least for now) and read the full transcript over at the ABC’s website. The other guests were Shel Holtz, co-author of Tactical Transparency; Mark Hannah, a New York-based communications consultant; Mike Hickinbotham, Telstra’s Social Media Senior Advisor; and ABC economic correspondent Stephen Long. well worth checking out.

Here’s the full text of my section.

Read the rest of this entry »

Telstra split and Brendan Nelson: 2008 predictions revisited

19 September 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

I’ve read so much about the Telstra break-up this week, and written and spoken about it so much, that my brain’s still fizzing. But here’s one thing: I predicted this more than a year ago!

On 2 January 2008 I wrote, as part of my Predictions for 2008:

Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.

OK, I got the timing wrong. But it does seem that I was reading the signs correctly.

Looking back at those predictions, I’m saddened to see that former defence minister Brendan Nelson hasn’t been investigated for his role in that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft — even if someone has since pointed me to their potential use in an electronic warfare role — but has instead been made ambassador to the EC, NATO, Belgium and Luxembourg, and special representative to the World Health Organisation.

Not quite the outcome I was after, unless some Eurospook’s going to give the good Dr Nelson a thorough probing in Brussels.

If that happens, I don’t want pictures.

So, I’m updating my 2008 predictions score to 56.25%, which is now a pass instead of a fail. That’s fair, right?

[Photo: Former Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, courtesy Wikipedia. I'm so thoroughly confused by the implications of the licensing on that image and a recent Creative Commons report on how people define "non-commercial" that I'll just say this post is licensed by whatever Creative Commons license it needs to be to shut everyone up. FFS write in Plain English, people!]