Thank you all for the many excellent comments posted in the past 48 hours. I’ve decided to concentrate on Anzac Day thoughts today — you’ll see a post momentarily — and I’ll respond later. Meanwhile do feel free to fight amongst yourselves. 
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No, there is no technical error. I really haven’t posted anything since Monday. Been otherwise occupied. I intend to fix that this afternoon with a mashup of my recent Crikey pieces about eBay Australia forcing its sellers to use PayPal — which they own. Meanwhile if you’re desperate for your daily dose of Stilgherrian, you could always follow my Twitter feed.
Yesterday I said I’d create a proof-of-concept video podcast last night. Later I decided I couldn’t be arsed, but didn’t bother telling you. I hope you’re not too disappointed. I haven’t decided when I’ll do it yet. You’ll just have to live with this additional uncertainty in the world.
… is that if you want to do a New Thing, you have to choose an Old Thing to stop doing. Otherwise you run out of hours in the day. And that doesn’t work.
I’ve written before how I’m starting a business called Skank Media, and the new Topic 9 website is the first project out of the starting gate. Certainly since the beginning of this year I’ve been spending more time writing too: 133 posts in January 2008 compared with just 16 a year before. I’ve spent more time in dialogs online too, re-establishing links with my community.
What’s the Old Thing that’s stopped?
I’ve been getting less sleep, certainly. And less exercise. But I’ve also been doing less work for my “old” business, Prussia.Net — and therein lies a problem. Prussia.Net is what generates the income.
Oops.
Yes, cashflows are down. And because I wanted to change Prussia.Net itself, that change process takes more time of its own too. Some client projects are running terribly late. I even lost a wonderful long-term client a few weeks ago because I couldn’t dedicate enough time to their change process.
Big Oops.
So for me, today’s the day I start sorting out that chronological challenge. Here’s how I’ll proceed…
Podcasting is now far, far easier and cheaper even than I’d imagined — even for complex productions. I’ve been experimenting. Here’s a very quick summary of what I’ve learned so far about doing this on a Mac, my platform of choice.
Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.
However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.
The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.
I’ve finally launched the website for my adventures to the Australia 2020 Summit and beyond: Topic 9 at topic9.com.au.
It’s pretty sparse to begin with, and I’m not quite sure exactly what I’ll be doing there — so suggestions are more than welcome. Some thoughts so far are:
- Gathering links to everyone else’s writing about this topic area for the Summit.
- Articles on people or ideas on how government could work in the future.
- Interviews with the delegates before they hit Canberra.
- Act as a central point of contact for whatever media coverage we can generate out of the summit, whether I go or not.
I certainly need to spice up the design a bit. I’ve kept the Tarski theme as used on this website and Skank Media for consistency, but it needs a tad more differentiation. soon, my precious ones, soon…
Any other ideas?
I’m starting to think that my “here’s what I’ve found” items should move from Twitter to Del.icio.us or maybe even Tumblr [no account there yet, will explore soon] and just be summarised here daily. Then Twitter can be just the day-to-day status stuff — which needn’t be archived here at all, but maybe elsewhere.
Are you OK with that one, Mat F?
There seems to be a surge in “RSS aggregator” products like FriendFeed to create a unified “life stream”. But the more I think about it, the more I think “one stream that contains everything” is wrong. It might be fine for archiving — for your needs. But what about those following you? Dumping everything into a single sewer of undifferentiated crap seems to throw the burden of understanding you onto you audience. And all successful media creation is about what the audience wants — no matter what the scale.
It’s better, I think, to separate out the threads into different streams. People can subscribe to the combination they want. And they can choose to view them in the aggregator of their choice.
Business contacts get your business posts. Family and friends get the status reports about your lunch. A select few choose to view the reports of your illicit camel sex. where they want them, when they want them.
Well, that’s what I think today, anyway. What do you think?
Oh, I get it. Social media “guru” Laurel Papworth has to kill time before her Saudi trip gets sorted out. So what does this visionary of society’s future do? She ropes me into a blogging meme. How modern. How avant garde!
How… 2005.
Laurel was tagged three months ago and is only getting to it now. And they’re not even real ropes!
Is that enough slagging-off? Shall I get on with it now?
Actually this will be fun on a Saturday morning. It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these. Here goes…
Hmmm… No, I’m not really happy with how the Twitter digests are presented. They dominate the website’s home page when in fact they’re very much secondary material. More thought required… but I’ll leave them as they are until I have a better answer.
As an experiment, I’m going to publish daily digests of my Twitter updates. Let me know what you think. If you don’t know WTF I’m talking about, go to Twitter and then look at twitter.com/stilgherrian. The most recent 10 tweets are visible on my website, but I’m starting to do quite a few more than that every day.
A witty headline, eh? OK, well, only a little bit witty. But I missed marking the major milestone of Post 1000 on this website, so I thought this would be the next best thing.
The annoying thing is, I don’t have anything to say about the Australia 2020 Summit right now, and I have plenty of other things to write about. So let’s pretend you didn’t see this post, and I’ll write the update later, OK?
“A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author — in other words, anyone producing works of art — needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”
So says Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, in his latest essay 1000 True Fans.
It’s worth reading the full essay to completely grok what he’s on about. But in brief, a “true fan” is someone who’ll purchase anything and everything you produce.
They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans…
Kelly’s point is that the Internet allows you to find and stay in touch with True Fans cheaply and easily — globally. He gives some useful numbers to help think it through, and opoints to some examples which are already working.
Thank you, Richard, but no. This article in The Onion is not about me. Close though, eh?
I’ve just registered the Internet domain topic9.com.au, where I’ll set up a blog to discuss topic number 9 of the Australia 2020 Summit: “The future of Australian governance: renewed democracy, a more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the Federation and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.”
I won’t have time to do anything with it until (probably) tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, can you suggest people who might be interesting contributors?
I’ve been working on the tag cloud page, and one of my attempts to clarify things has revealed a disturbing fact.
I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.
Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!
Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.
My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.
Is that right?
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