See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

• “I have never used Twitter” — Are Politicians ill-advised to let their Advisors do the Tweeting? | media140.org: Paul Farrell looks at politicians and their tweets following Malcolm Turnbull’s revelation at Media Sydney that his staffer Thomas Tudehope sometimes tweeted on his behalf, and Barack Obama’s admission that he’s never used Twitter at all.
• Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs | Boing Boing: If you have working knowledge of English, basic computer skills and an Internet connection, then you can get a job anywhere in the world.
• cufón — fonts for the people: A JavaScript-based tool for using any typeface you like in web pages. I haven’t explored it myself, but I do know Crikey‘s website uses it.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of Iranians Are on Twitter | Gawker: Some reality-check commentary on the “Twitter revolutionised Iran” meme.
• Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a list | Quote and Comment: How can we pay for journalism? Here’s Jay Rosen’s list of possibilities, assembled for the conference “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”
• Someday You’ll Remember I Said This | Daily Patricia: Entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel says Twitter isn’t microblogging. She differentiates between “publishing” and “person-to-person communications” and reckons Twitter’s in the second category, not the first. That, she reckons, is leading people to over-value Twitter monetarily.
• How to play piano like Philip Glass | YouTube: Torley explains in just 10 minutes how to compose and play music like Philip Glass.
• The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media | newmatilda.com: Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong, looks at the #PwnedNudieRun interaction between ABC TV’s Media Watch and folks on Twitter. I particularly like his “lesson for the low-rent McLuhans who see social media succeeding broadcast media in some simple transition”. Many insights.
• Declassified Blog | Newsweek.com: A new blog by investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball with contributions from other Newsweek journalists. It will focus on national security, intelligence and law enforcement issues.
• Judge Bans Twitter From Court | CBS News: While in some jurisdictions journalists have been permitted to tweet form courtrooms, US District Judge Clay Land in Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibit “broadcasting” and that Twitter is a broadcast medium. This decision will doubtless annoy som of the social media evangelists who see “broadcast” as a swear word.
• Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media | bronwen clune: Bronwen Clune’s presentation from Media140 Sydney.
• The Future Of Journalism Needs Journalists | newmatilda.com: Marni Cordell, editor of newmatilda.com, expresses some concerns about the ABC’s vision of community-based media, as outlined by managing director Mark Scott at Media140 Sydney.
• Media140 Sydney: Future Of Journalism In The Social Media Age | jjprojects: John Johnston’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• Twitter as a Journalistic Tool: Drilling Beneath the Rhetoric | J-scribe: The second half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• It’s a Revolution, Not a War | J-scribe: The first half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository: Al Jazeera has put all their raw camera footage from the War on Gaza online under a Creative Commons license, “Attribution”, which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. “This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.” They so get it.
• Sky News – Interview with Rupert Murdoch | YouTube: The full 37-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which he suggests he’ll block Google from indexing News Corporation news sites.
• Media140 Sydney | Public Opinion: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• No Strings Attached: Public Broadcaster Seeks Relationships for Collaboration, Conversation and New Ideas: The Media140 Sydney keynote speech from ABC managing director Mark Scott. This is the PDF of his slides with his speaking notes. It includes a look at some of the ABC’s plans for pro-am media creation.
• Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let’s just own up to our agendas | mUmBRELLA: In this guest post about Media140 Sydney, Cathie McGinn argues there’s no such thing as total objectivity, so better to disclose your agenda.
• My Two Francs Worth: Media 140 | LinenSuave: A parable of sorts about Media140 Sydney, and the pointlessness of the whole bloggers versus journalists debate.
• Journalism and blogging at Media140 | Barry Saunders: “Investigative journalism — while a very valuable form of journalism, and one we need more of — is a very minor part of journalism as it exists, and an over-focus on investigative journalism as the dominant form of journalism obscures vast bodies of journalistic output.”
• Media140 handouts | Claire’s posterous: The BBC’s Claire Wardle presents a beginners guide to using Twitter (including links to other good introductions to Twitter sites), and a general basic handout which covers some of the other social media tools she discussed in her Media140 Sydney workshop.
• Media140 | Flickr: Wolf Cocklin’s photos from Media140 Sydney.
• Call Recorder for Skype | Ecamm Network: This is the OS X tool I mentioned at Media140 Sydney for recording your Skype conversations, both audio and video. Cheap and extremely useful.
• Too tired to tweet | ABC News: ABC political correspondent Lyndal Curtis has been following Media140 Sydney but doesn’t know where people get the time to participate. I really should write a response to this, as I reckon there’s a very clear counter-argument.
• Journalists on Twitter need to ‘be human’ | Renai LeMay: The Media140 Sydney presentation from Renai LeMay, News Editor at ZDNet Australia.
• Congratulations to the ABC | Telstra Exchange: A post on Telstra’s new Exchange corporate blog about the ABC’s new social media policy from Telstra’s Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, David Quilty. Includes links to Telstra’s own social media policies.
• The ABC of social media use | ABC News: The ABC News story that includes the announcement of the ABC’s new social media policy for staff, presented at Media140 Sydney by Managing Director Mark Scott.
• Alex Hawke Liberal Party Downfall | YouTube: The video which supposedly caused Thomas Tudehope to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s staff.
• YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder | ABC News: Malcolm Turnbull’s staffer Thomas Tudehope has been forced to resign after reports of his involvement in the distribution of a satirical video about the Liberal Party’s factional battles.
• “How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?” | Paul Farrell: SBS’s head of news and current affairs Paul Cutler asked this provocative question at Media140 Sydney, pointing out that despite the supposed breakthroughs of social media, the genocide in Sri Lanka is failing to get much media coverage.
• Riyaad Minty: Sydney’s Speaker Pash (International Social Media Case Studies) | Media140: Paul Farrell’s commentary on the Media140 Sydney presentation by Al Jazeera’s head of social media, Riyaad Minty. Minty was one of the event’s highlights, in my opinion.
• Malcolm Turnbull | Twitter: The tweet when Australia’s opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull announced that he’d start identifying whether it was he tweeting personally, or a staffer. This came less than three hours after he was asked at Media140 whether there wasn’t an ethical issue with lack of disclosure, especially since Prime MInister Kevin Rudd made the distinction clear in his own tweets.
• The Spin Fails Here: Day One At #Media140 Sydney | The Inquisitr: The Inquisitor‘s editor Duncan Riley wasn’t happy with what he heard at Media140 Sydney, especially that Problogger creator Darren Rowse is the only Australian making money online. There is much bitterness here.
• Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging | Woolly Days: Thoughts on Media140 Sydney from Brisbane-based journalist, blogger and QUT researcher Derek Barry.
• Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks | Slideshare: More solid support for the idea that the future of the African internet is mobile. Plenty of stats and some important observations from Jude Mathurine, who heads up the New Media lab at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
• Apparently editors nurture their journalists by telling them it’s okay to get stuff wrong | mUmBRELLA: One section of Laurel Papworth’s presentation at Media140 Sydney didn’t go down so well at mUmBRELLA…
• Media140 today | Visible Procrastinations: A collection of links to commentary about Media140 Sydney’s first day. I have yet to go though them, but when I do I’ll add the relevant ones to my own Delicious feed.
• Media140 Sydney: Social Media Twitter & Journalism | Laurel Papworth: Laurel Papworth’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, in which she positions social media as the people taking back control and ownership of their stories. Word and video available.
• Media140 Sydney 2009 | Flickr: Neerav Bhatt’s photos of Media140 Sydney. He seems to have captured every speaker.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the (social) media. With Fran Kelly | SlowTV: Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is interviews by the ABC’s Fran Kelly about his use of social media in the political context, including a little bit of point-scoring.
• How social media is changing political reporting | SlowTV: The full Media140 Sydney session “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting” with Annabel Crabb, Bernard Keane (Crikey), Chris Uhlmann (ABC), John Kerrison (Nine) and Caroline Overington (The Australian).
• Caroline Overington takes on Mark Scott and the free digital news proponents | YouTube: A 4-minute extract from Overington’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, which turned into a massive anti-ABC pro-Murdoch rant.
• Conceptual Confusion and Journalistic Process — My Highlights and Lowlights of Media 140 | The Content Makers: “The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between… a platform, and a process… [and] objectivity and integrity.”
• So what’s the “cool new toy”? | The Content Makers: Speculation about News Corporation’s plans for some digital news device. Is Apple involved? An iRupert? A RuPod? The SunKindle?
• Caroline Overington Gives Some Hints on Rupert’s Plans (and tangles with Annabel Crabb) | The Content Makers: Margaret Simons’ original report on the rather strange Media140 Sydney presentation by News Limited journalist Caroline Overington and her stoush with Annabel Crabb, who’s moving from Fairfax to the ABC.
• The ABC Springs Leaks in the Porous Digital Age. Mark Scott AGAIN. | The Content Makers: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons covers some of the announcements made my Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, at Media140 Sydney.
• Can Social Media Save Iran? | newmatilda.com: A Media140 presentation by Dr Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. A nice debunking of some of the social media over-hype.
• John Bergin’s Media 140 Speech | The Content Makers: John runs “digital online stuff” for Sky News Australia, on the pay TV networks. This is his presentation from Media140 Sydney. Some good points about listening as well as speaking.
• Off Air: Iran, Twitter and the new media world. | Off Air: The presentation to Media140 Sydney by the highly-respected journalist Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio National’s PM program.
• Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media | Quote and Comment: Jay Rosen’s presentation at Media140 covered 10 key sound-bites and what they mean for the future of journalism. Here are those ten points, with links to further material on each one.
• freesound: “The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.” I’ve used this to source sound effects myself, and it’s wonderful.
• “I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Crap.” | Flickr: A photo taken in Washington, DC during the 27 January 2007 anti-war march. This was used by Barry Saunders in his Media140 presentation.
• Journalism — a defence | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook took exception to my Media140 presentation and spend a few hundred words saying so. I added a little to the discussion, and will add more later when I get time.
• Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS): This is the software which Al Jazeera and friends developed for that “War on Gaza” experiment in crowdsourced crisis information mapping. Yes, it’s free open-source software.
• War on Gaza – Experimental Beta | Al Jazeera Labs: An intriguing experiment from Al Jazeera. Anyone can post reports such as casualty counts directly to the site. all of them are then mapped categorised.
• Media140: I am the bastard child of old & new media…| The Digital Wing: The Media140 presentation from Valerio Veo, who’s been in charge of SBS News& Current Affairs Online since 2006.
• Bleating innocents or matted satans: the goat in art | guardian.co.uk: “Jonathan Jones shepherds us through goat art,” it says. Maybe that should be “goatherds us”.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism | Stilgherrian: Another long essay from me in September 2008 which is perhaps a prelude to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• “Trouble at t’paper” | Stilgherrian: My essay from September 2008 which formed some of the background to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• Changing spaces in media | Aide-Memoire: Kate Carruthers’ observations form Media140 Sydney. “The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one… There seemed to be little idea amongst these panellists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.”
• Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos | ABC News: A report on Jay Rosen’s keynote from Media140 Sydney. “He says journalists should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.”
• Sydney Media140 sessions: The program for Media140 Sydney, held 5 to 6 November 2009, with brief speaker bios, photos and links to their Twitter profiles.

There’s so many of these links this time that I’ll publish them over the fold. I think I need to get over my fear of the link being published automatically without my checking them first, and my concern that my website won’t look nice if the first post is just a list of links.

Maybe I should just stick these Delicious-generated links in a sidebar? Or do you like having them in the main stream and RSS feed?

• INFOWAR vs. CORPORATIONS | Global Guerrillas: John Robb’s essay outlines a potential strategy for conducting infowar against corporations — most of which looks to me like it’d be illegal. I suppose that’s what war is about, eh? The comments stream is somewhat amusing.
• “Artists Should Be Compensated For Their Work” | QuestionCopyright.org: Nina Paley’s controversial-looking essay which posits that artists are not entitled to be paid for their art, only for their work. She’s using these and other terms in quite specific ways, so it’s worth reading carefully before passing judgement.
• Post-Medium Publishing | Paul Graham: In amongst the various current discussions of charging for news content online, Paul Graham makes an important point. “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?”
• Americans on Tailored Advertising: DO NOT WANT | denialism blog: No, Americans do not want tailored advertising on the Internet, even less so when told how their activities are monitored to make it work.
• A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare | Central Intelligence Agency: This eminently readable CIA monograph puts the Stanislav Petrov incident into perspective, explaining how and why the Soviet leadership feared a US first strike.
• The Man Who Prevented WWIII | DivineCaroline: In 1983, Stanislav Petrov was in charge of Soviet monitoring systems watching the US for signs of a nuclear first strike. One night he chose not to react to an alert, suspecting it was a false alarm. He was right, and a potential global nuclear exchange was avoided.
• The Fiction Generator | Wondermark: The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000 makes writers’ chores a breeze!
• Against Transparency | The New Republic: This essay on the perils of some “open government” initiatives is a pleasantly nuanced read.
• Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com: Wolff wrote a biography of Murdoch, and presumably knows the man. My take on this fascinating article is that the old guy simply doesn't understand what’s happening online, perhaps because you can inoly understand the online world if you participate in it.
• The News Manual: A free resource for journalists, would-be journalists, educators and people interested in the media. It was developed from a three-volume book The News Manual, published with the help of UNESCO as a practical guide to people entering the profession and to support mid-career journalists wanting to improve their skills.
• Televising Court Proceedings | SSRN: A 1993 paper by Ian Ramsay, then of the University of Melbourne Law School, setting out the main arguments for and against televising the proceedings of courts, and suggests an experimental program to evaluate the arguments in practice.
• The Law of Defamation | Arts Law Centre of Australia: A good introductory overview of how Australia’s tough anti-defamation laws work.
• chiropractic – The Skeptic’s Dictionary: When I was pointed to this article critical of chiropractic, I noted that it used some fallacious arguments which Science itself would not permit. I’m tagging it as an example of the hypocrisy of some perhaps only a few?) bold defenders of Science because it may form the basis of a future post.
• 55 Twitter tips | SmartCompany: While many of these tips for business aren’t entirely new, it’s a reasonable-enough compilation.
• Captain Kirk has taken too much fucking LSD | DoseNation: A nice bit o’music editing by Fall On Your Sword.
• How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half | Derek Powazek: Powazek published a photomag of images from Sydney’s dust storm, sourced from Flickr, without leaving his California base. This is a great step-by-step how-to.
• A history of the English marriage | Telegraph: It seems many of our current “norms” about marriage were invented by the Victorians.
• MoD “How to stop leaks” guide leaks | The Register: In a supreme act of irony, the UK’s Ministry of Defence document Defence Manual of Security has been leaked into Wikileaks. All 2300 pages.
• Twitter and the norm police | Woolly Days: Derek Barry sums up a recent discussion on Twitter, defamation and what constitutes “publication”. I’m tagging it because I want to respond at some point.
• Mash-up: A Short History of the Media Future | The Monthly: While perhaps not completely groundbreaking, this essay by John Birmingham is an excellent backgrounder on the issues facing traditional media companies.
• AUSTLANG: A new database of Australian indigenous languages, cross-linked to Google Maps.
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding | myliblog: An American library was asked to remove or restrict access to a children’s book about gay relationships. The librarian wrote a detailed and well-reasoned response explaining why it stays.
• Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies | Chief Information Officers Council: What it says. The first version of new rules for US federal agencies.
• Hyperconnectivity | Wikipedia: The term “hyperconnectivity” now has its own Wikipedia entry. Where’s mine?
• 99 Led Balloons: Social Media Blunders | digitalOZ: A nice list of classic social media traps for young players. A shame 90% of businesses entering the world of social media will end up making quite a few of them.
• The Moguls’ New Clothes | The Atlantic: There is much sense in this analysis of Big Media and how that Internet thing is changing everything.
• Eureka moments | The Economist: How the mobile phone became a key tool for third-world development.
• 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.

Click through for the full-sized image.

Yes, I still have thousands of things to do. But it’s Friday night and I’m exhausted, so I’ll tell you all about it in the morning. Probably.

Meanwhile, I’d live to know what you’re thinking about Project TOTO, so have a look at the previous posts and say stuff and ask questions and things.

And if you’re wondering who the people quoted are, try @mpesce, @snarkyplatypus, @kcarruthers and @apostrophepong. And also click through to ActionAid Australia for The Good Cause.

• The Poll Cruncher | Pollytics: How trustworthy is the result of an opinion poll? This handy little tool allows you to enter the sample size and the result, and it gives you the margin of error. Assuming, of course, that the poll was conducted randomly and ethically in the first place.
• What’s Your Professional Reputation? | Pollytics: Possum interprets the latest results from the Roy Morgan poll of public perceptions of ethics and honesty for various professions. As usual, newspaper journalists and car salesmen are down the bottom. Possum creates a nice little interactive graph showing how the result have changed each year since 1979.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four turns sixty | Inside Story: Brian McFarlane’s take on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s classic. Somehow, while talking about film adaptations and connections to Phillip K Dick, he completely fails to mention Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
• Dear Global Service Direct, where is my Snuggie? | Crikey: Crikey‘s coverage of their interactions with the Snuggie has the potential to become quite obsessive. In a good way. However this silly exchange of emails with Snuggie’s sellers contain one of the best customer service responses ever: “I wish I could do more but I am just a pawn.” Also, a graph.
• From little things… | RN Future Tense: This episode of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense included an interview with ActionAid Australia’s Archie Law about Project TOTO, as well as some great stuff about innovative uses of telecommunications technology in Kenya and India. Internet via bus, anyone?
• William Langewiesche on Somali pirates | vanityfair.com: Feature article on the incident where French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was targeted by Somali pirates.
• louder than swahili: The blog of Pernille, a 37yo Scandinavian woman who’s been living in Tanzania since 2007, and most recently before that spent 26 months among Sudanese refugees along and across the Ugandan border to Southern Sudan.
• A Never Ending Race | absolutelybangkok.com: Bangkok in 2015 is a paranoid short yarn from Yan Monchatre, a French cartoonist and illustrator who’s resident in Bangkok.
• The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection | Moserware: A deep, deep explanation of what happens when your web browser creates an encrypted connection to a website.
• mHITs: An Australian company providing the technology to pay by mobile phone. Currently seems to be limited to food and drink, and to a handful of venues in Canberra and Sydney.
• The United Republic Consulate of Tanzania Consulate: This is, I hope, the official website of the Consulate for Tanzania in Melbourne. It’s not particularly reassuring when the home page’s title bar reads: “::Welcom to Company Name::”.
• Rise of online mercenaries | Australian IT: Steven Bellovin, professor of computing science at Columbia University, predicts the rise of online mercenaries using techniques going back 200 years to letters of marque and reprisal, where governments commission somebody to attack another government’s assets with perfect immunity under law. The story’s a couple weeks old but still relevant.

The guy in the photo is Jerry Watkins, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne — and I want to slap him.

This morning he was a guest on ABC Radio National’s FutureTense, where he talked about some fantastic third-world technology projects, like India’s DakNet.

A Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver is fitted to the local bus. So the bus drives along its normal route, goes through a number of villages, and what it’s doing while it’s stopping at the bus stop in each village, is simply picking up and delivering information via Wi-Fi from publicly-accessible computers in each village… Once it gets back into town, it simply uploads all its stored data onto the Internet… So in this way, the rural community is getting access to a very affordable internet connection, it’s just simply not always on…

It’s services like e-shopping which are proving increasingly popular with these users. So e-shopping is using the bus internet system, and it allows villagers to order essential items and luxury items, which just aren’t available at the village market. And what’s more, the items are often delivered to the village on the very same bus with the Wi-Fi transmitter.

Awesome. But that’s not why I want to slap him.

I want to slap Jerry Watkins because he said daft things about Australia’s proposed National Broadband Network.

It seems that Mr Watkins is rather skeptical about the point of the NBN.

We’re going to have a super-fast broadband network put into 98% of the country. That’s absolutely great for me; I’m looking forward to it. I use the internet a lot and a faster connection in my front room would be fabulous. However, a lot of the things I do, do I need super-fast broadband? Well email doesn’t, banking and bill-paying doesn’t, e-government doesn’t, searching for stuff on Google doesn’t, selling stuff on eBay doesn’t, iTunes doesn’t, Facebook doesn’t, Amazon doesn’t. These are some of the main applications that have been talked about as like the hero apps of internet. They don’t really need fibre to the node or super fast broadband connections.

The kind of things that do, with current technology, might be sharing video on YouTube, or online gaming, or internet protocol TV, like Bit Torrent, even bidding on eBay where you want fast internet connection so your bid gets in quickly at the last minute. But do I actually need a national broadband network to deliver online TV? Hmm.

Jerry, there’s a reason that “searching for stuff on Google”, “selling stuff on eBay”, “Facebook” and “Amazon” don’t “need” 100Mb fibre. That’s because they exist now, but the network doesn’t.

The applications that need near-universal 100Mb broadband don’t exist yet. They can’t exist and won’t exist until the network itself is built.

Only once the network is built will people be able to use it to develop those applications. Some article I linked to once — and I couldn’t be arsed looking for it now — pointed out that those clever Swedish folk could develop Skype only because they had the network and could tinker.

Also, it’s a bit rich to snidely imply that high-speed broadband is only useful for indulgences like gaming and “sharing videos on YouTube” — although videos can also be used for education and commerce, not just passive entertainment.

Also, BitTorrent is not IP TV.

Mr Watkins, I don’t know you. Your work maybe good. But on this occasion you’re suffering from a failure of the imagination, I reckon.

Oh, there’s other good stuff in the program, including the fact that Kenya has more advanced mobile phone-based services than the US, and an interview with ActionAid‘s CEO Archie Law about Project TOTO.

People have been asking whether I’m excited about my trip to Africa. To be perfectly honest, I’m not.

Or at least not yet.

Project TOTO is still too abstract. There’s no firm dates, there’s no clear itinerary and, from a project management point of view, no clearly defined goals. Not because the project isn’t happening or doesn’t have support or isn’t being planned properly, but simply because that detailed conversation with ActionAid Australia about priorities has yet to take place.

That conversation is scheduled for this coming Friday 12 June.

Meanwhile, I’ve had many, many things on my mind. Most of them are completely unrelated to Project TOTO. But all of them have conspired to make the last three weeks extremely stressful indeed.

That’s one reason why my last video diary was back on 21 May. That’s a screenshot at the top of this post. I’m looking tired, eh? And I’ve been even more stressed since.

It’s time to catch up. So, even though this is the Queen’s Birthday holiday, here’s a rambling update. With some pictures.

What can I confirm about Project TOTO today?

• The destination country is definitely Tanzania.
• I’ll be leaving some time in the next month, probably sooner.
• I’ll be in-country for a week.
• I’ll spend some time in ActionAid’s office in Dar es Salaam, but I’ll also be visiting some of their field projects — places like those in the photos. No running water. Dodgy electricity. But, I’m told, there’s decent mobile phone coverage in 70% of these rural villages.
• My goals will include setting up a “field blogging outpost” and also reporting on my experiences along the way.

That last point is causing a bit of stress.

One media release talked about a “live video outpost in the remote region, training the local community to use it”. That’s one hell of an ask.

Live video at Ustream quality, which is what I use for Stilgherrian Live, requires a 400 kilobit per second uplink. Even here in Sydney’s inner suburbs, that’s available only if you’ve got a hard-wired ADSL2+ or cable connection (typically a 1Mb/s uplink) or Telstra’s Next G mobile broadband tuned for HSUPA (ditto). None of the other mobile broadband providers can deliver.

In Tanzania, there’s 1Mb/s DSL in Dar es Salaam, but that’ll have a maximum uplink speed of 128kb/sec. If we’re lucky. Outside the city we’re essentially at dial-up speeds or worse, either on overloaded DSL or whatever data links the mobile carriers can provide.

Even the new Thuraya satellite phones (pictured) only deliver 9.6kb/s. Thuraya does have a laptop-sized data terminal which can deliver 144kb/s — but I’m getting conflicting reports about Dar es Salaam and the south of Tanzania being in their coverage area for data.

One reason I dropped the video diaries is that a 5-minute video can be more than 40Mb of data. Imagine uploading that over dodgy dial-up!

Time is a factor here.

Once I’ve thought about what to say, recorded the video, compressed it and uploaded it, that’s an hour out of my day. Is that the best use of my time when only 124 people have watched the first episode (as of today) compared with 2000+ reading the words?

(And consider that in the same period, more than 15,000 read my article Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting” — though they may have been looking for something slightly different.)

If I’m going to produce any worthwhile media out of Tanzania, something that isn’t the usual clichés, I’ll need time to reflect.

OK, I’m stressed about other things too. But I’m conscious that ActionAid is investing significant resources (for them) and trying something new (for them). ActionAid Australia, despite four decades of experience as Austcare, is now the new kid on the block. Doubtless they’re fearful of failure. As a result, so am I.

Very fearful.

Now a typical 500-word Crikey article takes an hour or two to write, as does a post like this if I’m preparing photos. A reflective, insightful essay or feature article can take half a day. A liveblog like Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown unfolds in real time over a couple of hours, but you have to be relaxed and “in the zone” for it to work. Unreliable Bangkok 3: Bureaucracy was based on an entire day’s experiences, and only emerged weeks later.

What if there’s so many things happening that the Muse is not with me?

That’s why TV sports coverage is so banal. The swimmer has just exerted himself to the utmost and broken the 400m record. He’s barely emerged from the pool. The adrenalin is surging through his brain. And yet we stick a microphone into his face and expect him to say something meaningful. There’s a reason the Australian Institute of Sport trains its athletes to have the clichés ready, and a reason those clichés — and only those clichés — roll out.

How will I balance the demands of producing this sort of material with, you know, “setting up a live video outpost in the remote region, training the local community to use it”?

What if I get to a remote village and discover that I’ve forgotten some key component? It’s not like I can just nip down the shop!

How will I avoid being yet another white bloke rolling into town telling the locals what to do?

There.

That’s all out of my system now. While the non-TOTO stresses have not subsided, at least I feel that I’ve accomplished something today. And now I can take a break and tackle my presentation for the SoGiKII Law, Communication Technologies and Culture Conference.

Which is tomorrow.

But starting tomorrow I’ll try to gradually shift into a regular daily pattern of posting photos and writing. Wish me luck. And perhaps ask me questions and stuff that I can answer in future posts.

[Photos: Tanzanian village photos courtesy ActionAid Australia. All rights reserved.]

• How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live | TIME: Yes, TIME magazine’s cover story is about Twitter. It starts extremely badly: that clichéd, lazy trope about people tweeting what they had for breakfast. Despite that inexcusable slackness, it’s a useful addition to the cornucopia of Twitter-based articles.
• 10 Things I would do differently | Still A Newspaperman: Written with the benefit of hindsight, a former newspaper journalist considers how he’d have handled running a metropolitan newspaper. He’s spot on in many ways.
• Can the EU play Battleships? | Global Dashboard: Is it time for Europe, as a united entity, to develop a naval strategy? The article’s illustration is also a remarkable example of period gender stereotyping.
• How IT Can Save Africa | SAP Network Blogs: While clunkily-written, this piece outlines why getting decent IT to Africa isn’t a “waste”, but in fact a core element of getting rid of poverty.
• How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems) | ReadWriteWeb: It turns out that the staff of Twitter don’t use it like “power users” like me use it. Could this affect the tool’s development?
• The oldest sculpture ever discovered is a 36,000 year old woman with really big breasts. Is anyone surprised? | 3quarksdaily: Dubbed the “Venus of Hohle Fels”, this 6cm tall sculpture us about 36,000 years old. And it has large breasts.
• Live Streaming Video From Livestream.com: The live video streaming service Mogulus has re-branded as Livestream. That should Hoover them into some generic wordspace, yeah. (Google it!)
• Spootnik: A tool to automatically synchronise information between 37signals’ Basecamp (which use extensively) and OmniFocus (which intend to use).
• Tom’splanner: Another software as a service start-up, this time about “creating and sharing project schedules”. Their website’s menu bar is the clichéd list of Home, tour, product Info, Pricing and — of course! — “Buzz”, so it must be good. Sigh.
• How Journalists Are Using Twitter in Australia | PBS: Julie Posetti’s rather reasonable article which responds to “the views of resistors and detractors” who argue that “Twitter isn’t journalism”. “Sound familiar to veterans of the great blogging vs journalism debate?” she asks. “Of course Twitter isn’t journalism, it’s a platform like radio or TV but with unfettered interactivity. However, the act of tweeting can be as journalistic as the act of headline writing. Similarly, the platform can be used for real-time reporting by professional journalists in a manner as kosher as a broadcast news live report.”
• Light Rail to Summer Hill | Metro Transport: The other Monday, yet another proposal for a new transport line in Sydney went to NSW state cabinet. This one involves extending the existing light rail line by 3.7km from Lilyfield to Summer Hill by converting the Rozelle freight line. It also has the advantage of running through the state seat of Balmain, where sitting Labour member Verity Firth runs the risk of losing to The Greens in the 2011 election.

“I’d add that that face is almost always unexpected.” — Mark Pesce (in private conversation)

Clearly I’m not going to get anything else written until I respond to The Gnome Situation. I’ve been reading the comments and mulling possible responses for days. It’s getting in the way of actual, productive work. So here we go.

No. I will not be removing Gnaomi from my desk.

Discussing an issue as important as rape through the proxy of an anthropomorphised piece of clay seems, to me, a poor tactic. Nor will I compromise the actual or perceived independence of my media output, no matter how worthy the cause.

There’ll probably be people at ActionAid who won’t like or understand that outcome, so here’s the long explanation…

Certainly appalling sexual crimes are committed against women. Certainly such crimes include, at their core, the psychology of men viewing those women as mere objects for their gratification, or to smash to assert their power. Having been close to people who’ve experienced sexual abuse, some of it violent, I have a little understanding of the damage it causes.

A little.

I’m sure that ActionAid deals with people who’ve suffered even more horrific violations. I cannot imagine what those people have gone through, and still go through, and actually I do not wish to be able to imagine it.

Now there’s a conversation we can and should have about the way women are portrayed in our society.

Why do we have continuing allegations of sexual assault against footballers who are meant to be role models? That’s deeply problematic not because the sex happened in a group, but the power relationships and consent — or the lack thereof.

Why has almost all of the analysis of that debacle, like Annabel Crabb’s, been about how the men’s sexuality is framed, but not why young women become attracted to ignorant thugs? Not that that’s an excuse for those men’s behaviour, of course, but it is another layer to the complexity of the situation.

Why do early-evening TV game shows have a male host to lead the conversation, with women reduced to being decorative stands for the cases of cash — all dressed identically to further reduce their humanity?

Why does a nation like the United States go into paroxysms because a woman’s breast was exposed at a football match, and yet doesn’t bat an eyelid over nightly fictional slaughter on TV? Or over the actual, non-fictional slaughter by gunfire of 82 citizens every single day, many being suicides?

Why would a woman’s wardrobe malfunction hardly raise an eyebrow in France?

Why do trade shows like CeBIT still have booth babes who know nothing about the product? Why did NEWS.com.au describe Netregistry’s nurses as wearing “flashy outfits” when they were actually completely “covered up”? Why did I, for that matter, describe them as “naughty nurses” in the first place, referencing a popular cultural meme in a comment which probably triggered that whole discussion?

All these are important questions.

Complex questions.

Quite frankly, the equation “naked breasts = degradation and exploitation” is a dangerous over-simplification.

And it’s just plain wrong.

The logical gap has already been pointed out by vealmince. Yes, terrible things are done to women. But that connects back to this clay garden gnome how, exactly?

Why, as my friend and colleague Kate Carruthers asks, are naked breasts automatically “bad”, exactly?

As Joanna White (@mediamum) says, “Crap, Stil. Boobs celebrate the empowerment of women, not their degradation. Tell ‘em it’s a fertility symbol.”

As Kate points out, women in cultures such as Amazonian tribes, Australia’s own Aborigines or the patrons of Bondi Beach have their breasts exposed as part of their everyday tradition — or at least they did before interfering European busy-bodies told them it was “immoral”, somehow.

After all, it was Victorian society and its suppressed sexuality which got the ignorant natives to cover up. “Victorian prudery sometimes went so far as to deem it improper to say ‘leg’ in mixed company; instead, the preferred euphemism ‘limb’ was used,” says Wikipedia.

I reckon that simplistic equation says more about how Western societies have suppressed sexuality, made it all taboo and naughty, rather than including sexuality as one component of a healthy, properly-integrated human society.

And, as my esteemed colleague Guy Rundle pointed out in Crikey the other day in relation to the NRL scandal, the men’s bad behaviour is still somehow the women’s fault. The “naked breasts = exploitation” meme is still really that old chestnut that weak men become uncontrollable sex maniacs if they’re confronted with exposed mammaries. Cover them up, lest the women be raped! Did you see how she was dressed? She had it coming!

But back to the gnome…

That stupid gnome has been part of nearly every video I’ve done since His Benevolence Stilgherrrian’s Christmas Message, and it’s there precisely because it’s tasteless.

His Benevolence, as a character, is a self-indulgent despot. He therefore decorates his realm with symbols of his power. As with the Evil Genius of action-thriller fiction, powerfully sexy woman are always close at hand, reinforcing the villain’s own masculinity and self-control. But His Benevolence, laughably incompetent and barely coherent, is instead accompanied by a cheeky Benny Hill parody of those sexy women — and not even a real woman at that, but a mere garden gnome. It’s part of the shtick.

Gnaomi was even named after Naomi Robson, a television presenter whose screen presence, some might argue, was all about ego and style over substance. Remember the lizard? Gnaomi is Naomi in clay and glossy paint: truly an empty media vessel.

That’s why on Stilgherrian Live she takes on the face of whoever I want to ridicule that week — usually a politician or media identity, of any gender.

Actually, that’s all a bullshit justification after the fact.

What really happened is that we were shooting the Christmas Message on a tight deadline. I asked ’Pong to grab some tasteless decorations from the $2 shop, and this stupid sexist gnome was one of them. Little thought went into it, beyond “OMFG that’s so tasteless!” Perhaps that does reveal something about our attitudes to women. Who knows.

But here’s the thing. That stupid goddam gnome has starred in a dozen videos, viewed by hundreds of people. And while my audience obviously isn’t representative of the full spectrum of Australian society — no need to call in the statisticians, I do know this — I find it interesting that it’s really only the staff of ActionAid who’ve complained.

I toyed with the idea of doing a vox pop to see what women thought of the gnome, but there’s no need. When intelligent and media-savvy women like Kate Carruthers and Joanna White wonder what the issue is here, when Avril Hodge and Demi Moore call themselves @mrsnickhodge and @mrskutcher online knowing it defines them in terms of their husbands as irony, I’m reminded that we do live in a post-feminist society — and, yes, that’s a term riddled with problems.

The original feminist stereotypes are now inadequate. We acknowledge that a woman’s sexuality can be a thing of power. Ask any burlesque performer. Ask any hooker whose business model isn’t focussed on supporting a smack habit. Gawd, if you called Adelaide übermadam Stormy Summers “exploited” she’d slap you!

Now whether our society’s norms are healthy or not, whether they’re contributing to the problem of sexual violence against women or not, is a whole ‘nuther question, and one I’m happy to discuss.

In fact, some of the discussion over at the original post is wonderful, even if it’s edging towards an aggressive tone in places. Provided it stays civil, or only mock-angry, I’d love that discussion to continue. It’ll help ActionAid find the right tone for talking about these vital issues.

But the gnome stays.

This website, stilgherrian.com, is my place. My home on the web. No-one walks into my home and tells me what to do — at least not without a warrant. Or perhaps a gun. Sorry, Archie, but “Bad news Stil the gnome has to go” and “you need to remove the gnome”, expressed as they are in the imperative voice — i.e. as an order — rub me up the wrong way, even if unintentionally.

I also don’t wish to damage my personal brand as a writer.

Part of the strength of my writing is that I call it how I see it — even if that causes a bit of shock-horror sometimes. I swear. I call for people to be killed. I tell off-colour jokes. Yeah, it’s over the top. But it’s me. And because of that, people trust what I write.

When I praised and (lightly) damned Telstra’s Next G network, for example, regular readers knew that’s because I really did like it, not because Telstra gave me a freebie. And it didn’t stop me being highly critical of Telstra’s broadband strategy, or of its outgoing CEO, or of their PR guy who played the man and not the ball.

I don’t want to lose that trust.

People don’t listen to Bono any more. Well, OK, that’s because Bono is a wanker. And because “strident” is a turn-off. But neither do they listen to the manicured celebrities who helicopter into disaster zones to deliver in earnest tones some carefully pre-packaged Message.

Now I did mention this in one of my video diaries, but I’ll put it here so everyone’s clear. As my original proposal said:

So that this is not, and is not perceived to be, “cash for comment”, we will need to make it clear that the main project is for me to set up ActionAid blogs. As a side effect, this provides the opportunity for me to produce my own content, over which Austcare/ActionAid has no editorial control.

I’m glad we’ve encountered the real-world impact of this issue while talking about a $3.50 garden gnome rather than, say, if I found an ActionAid worker drunk on duty. Or worse.

Now I won’t be carting a stupid lump of clay around Africa, so once I’m on the road Gnaomi will disappear from the screen. What happens after that remains to be seen. But whatever happens will happen because it was my honest, personal choice.

Project TOTO, this Grand Experiment, is truly a challenge, made more so because by definition it’s playing out in public.

ActionAid is engaging in the naked conversations of social media for the first time. There’s doubtless a sense of fear. Many of my readers and Twitter followers are influential media people — journalists, editors, TV and radio presenters, performers, academics, students. And of course ActionAid has its own stakeholders, some of whom may not be at all familiar with this new world.

But the Grand Experiment is also being followed by some of the more clueful social media practitioners and commentators. This is such a worthy cause they’ll probably offer plenty of feedback, advice and support along the way. ActionAid has a honeymoon period here. That’s going to be a wonderful conversation.

Finally, just so everyone’s clear, perhaps my posts need a disclaimer, eh?

[Disclaimer: Stilgherrian's opinions are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of ActionAid Australia or its international affiliates -- or anyone else for that matter.]

• The Age of the Essay | Paul Graham: This essay dates from 2004, but it’s still valid. The essay, the kind that’s about exploring an issue, is a natural form of writing online. Plus I like his comments about disobedience and creativity.
• GLAM | Wikimedia Australia: One for your diaries! A little conference called “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia: Finding the common ground” at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 6-7 August 2009. Hosted by Wikimedia Australia, with discussions on four themes: Education, Technology, Business, Law. To be opened by Senator Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT.
• That 180ms is the bane of my life: Network engineer Glen Turner explains why the 180 milliseconds it takes for Internet data to cross the Pacific causes problems. “You’ve got to realise that Australia is almost unique in being a long way from the centre of gravity of its language. Broadly, almost all German-speakers live in Germany, whereas a tiny proportion of English-speakers live in Australia. That has an effect on Internet traffic. Most Internet traffic in Germany stays within Germany. Most Internet traffic in Australia goes offshore.”
• One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t…: Crude but effective.
• Media and Brand Supremacy: Why the New Media Brand Could Be Nike | The Huffington Post: Heidi Sinclair notes that individual journalists and commentators are sometimes bigger news brands than the outlets they work for. There’s plenty here which meshes with my complains that some folks don’t separate the content (“news”) from the container (“newspapers”).
• texts from last night: A scarily funny collection of people’s (allegedly) drunken text messages. Don’t click through unless you’ve got plenty of time to spare.
• Death in Birth – Where Life’s Start Is a Deadly Risk | NYTimes.com: The first of three articles on efforts to lower the death rate in Tanzania. Excellent timing, given Project TOTO. Challenging to read, however
• The Angelina Factor | Bitchy Jones’ Diary: A ranty article which, in language which may be confronting for some, explores the social and psycho-sexual issues around the idea that Angelina Jolie is universally sexually attractive. Just for the record, I do not find her the least bit attractive.
• Rethinking the Global Money Supply: Scientific American: China has proposed that the world move to a more symmetrical monetary system, in which nations peg their currencies to a representative basket of others rather than to the US dollar alone. The article includes a little history, too.
• “We did not know that child abuse was a crime,”says retired Catholic archbishop | the freethinker: The retired Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G Weakland, says “We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature… [I] Accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’.” WTF?
• Comedy Thrives in Times of Despair | Spiegel Online: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on what the financial crisis is a boon for comics, and the perils of political correctness.
• Hello Africa | Vimeo: A 42-minute documentary about mobile phone culture in Africa.
• Shell On Trial | newmatilda.com: Next week, Shell will appear before a US federal court on charges of torture, extra-judicial killing and crimes against humanity for incidents which took place in the Niger Delta. Will it be the first multinational found guilty of human rights abuses?
• Genital warts take Shoaib out of Twenty20 World Cup | ABC News: There was a time when someone’s medical history was considered private, even if they played sports professionally. Personally, I reckon the specific of Shoaib’s medical problem are none of anyone else’s business.
• PlugComputer Community: The developer community for Marvell’s Plug Computer.
• Plugging In $40 Computers | NYTimes.com: Marvell Technology Group has created a “plug computer”. A tiny plastic box you plug into an electric outlet. No display, but Gigabit Ethernet and a USB. Inside is a 1.2GHz processor running Linux, 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash memory. US$99 today, probably under US$40 in two years.
• Misguided middle-class moaners | BusinessDay: Ross Gittins explodes a few myths about Australia, class, taxation and social welfare.

A video with Gnaomi and a cat? What a bonus!

Yesterday I was given a, erm, flowchart for diarrhoea, if you’ll excuse the phrase. I’d never realised that diarrhoea needed an instruction manual.

I was also given my vaccinations, as foreshadowed. And it’s all on video, to be published later.

Speaking of video, my diary entry is rather subdued today. Yes, vaccinations do make one feel crap. But I manage to talk about diarrhoea, and about how the online conversation about this project is already taking on a life of it own.

I’ll get that video online as soon as Viddler stops spitting the dummy.

ActionAid face an interesting challenge in taking on this project.

Their message is no longer being delivered through what the estimable Bronwyn Clune calls control media or what I usually call industrial-age media. They’re now participants in a social media conversation. Everyone in that conversation is a free agent, capable of saying what they wish — including myself.

ActionAid will have to overcome the fear of losing control.

Of course, as I explained in The Importance of Authenticity, they’ve never had control over what other people might say. It’s just that now all those ephemeral conversations are visible to everyone on the Internet. It’ll be interesting to see how a traditionally-structured organisation like ActionAid handles this new environment.

If you’ve been following my Twitter stream or read a certain recent blog post, you’ll know that a SEKRIT mission was being plotted. Tonight I can reveal… Project TOTO.

Late this afternoon I received my first briefing note, and it’s reproduced in full over the jump. However in summary, it appears that I’m going to Tanzania on behalf of ActionAid Australia (from 1 June, that’s the new name of Austcare) to report on what I see, and to establish a blog outpost in the local community.

Amongst other things, I’ll be posting daily video diaries. Here’s the first.

As you see, I’m only just starting to get my head around this. I’ve never been to Africa, and certainly not to the kinds of places that ActionAid operates. That’s challenging enough — except that I also have to set up a training program for people I’ve never met from a culture I’ve never encountered.

And deliver “media product” from locations where… well, where Internet bandwidth might not be as plentiful as I’m used to.

My head is exploding.

OK, here’s the briefing I received…and there’s more comment from me at the end.

#SECRETMISSION BRIEFING
19 May 2009

My Dear Stilgherrian,

As you are aware, over the last few weeks you have been drawn into #SECRETMISSION.

To recap, you have already agreed:

1. To be sent to an undisclosed African country;
2. To report on what you find there;
3. To undertake a technology challenge in that country.

Through the use of technology and social networks, you will enable a voice to be heard from this remote destination on an ongoing basis.

I can now confirm this mission is ACTIVE and provide you with further details of your task.

#SECRETMISSION active name is “The Overseas Training Operation” #TOTO.

Your Brief

Client: ActionAid Australia.
Mission: Use every available channel open to you in the fight to end poverty and injustice.
Location: United Republic of Tanzania.
Details: To meet this challenge, you must:

1. Conduct comprehensive physical and psychological preparation.
2. Undertake full briefings to gain a deep understanding of the political, economic and social realities of the target country.
3. Travel to the target country and build rapport with the locals.
4. Report freely on what you find utilising technology in remote terrain. Be warned you may have to face many psychological challenges, be affronted by injustice, social deprivation and cultural diversity you have never experienced in your life.
5. Establish a blog outpost in the local community, complete with all required technology.
6. Train the local community in best-practice blogging to ensure that long after you leave, their voices will continue to be heard loud and clear.

Your mentor for this mission will be Archie Law, CEO, ActionAid Australia. Keep him close to you, you will need his help.

Further details of this mission will be made available to you as we progress.

Good Luck my friend, I will be back in touch with further instructions soon.

Fi Bendall
Director
fiona@bendalls.com.au
+61 2 9948 0007
+61 (0) 431 032 426
Twitter: FiBendall
Sykpe: FiBendall
www.bendalls.com.au
www.digitalintelligence.com.au

There will be daily posts as we plan the mission, and I’ll be providing plenty of material from the field — words, pictures, videos.

This all takes place very, very soon. Although the specific dates haven’t been set yet, Austcare becomes ActionAid Australia on 1 June, and obviously this project is part of the “new” organisation’s launch — even though Austcare has been around since 1967.

There’s lots of ways you can follow my journey…

… although calling it my “journey” inspired a dear friend to pronounce that sending me on this mission is “Australian Idol meets South Park.” Well screw you, Mark!

Oh.

I see what you mean.

Anyway…

• Follow me on Twitter. I’ll tag everything related to this project with the hashtag #toto.
• Follow this blog. There’s a specific RSS feed for category “Project TOTO”. [Update Wednesday 20 May, 8.05am: If you subscribed to this RSS feed before now, you'll actually have subscribed to the "Arts" category. That'll teach me to test things at night. I'm a morning person! It's working now.]
• And more methods will come soon… like Flickr.

We’re also looking for sponsors who can help us out with equipment or services, and later up I’ll probably pass the hat for donations to ActionAid Australia and ask how you can help build community support. But all in good time. For now, um, whaddyathink?

(Oh, yes, the whole TOTO thing was inspire by this song. Obvious and lame, I know. And in the context of what I’ll probably encounter, wildly inappropriate. But you can’t pin that one on me.)

[Photo: Giraffe and Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania, by Fanny Schertzer.]

Episode 47 of Stilgherrian Live, the Cheap Edition, is now online for your viewing pleasure.

Actually it has been since shortly after the program finished on Thursday night, and you could have just gone to the channel page to watch it. I’ll sort out a better notification system when I get back from Africa.

Except you don’t know I’m going to Africa, because it’s SEKRIT.

There was another strong field this week for “Cnut of the Week”, too.

I thought Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would score more votes for the federal budget, but no. After winning last week, he only came in 4th (20%). ABC TV came in 3rd (24%) for choosing not broadcast the controversial mock anti-discrimination advertisement on The Gruen Transfer.

We had a draw for first place: Scott Swabey’s nomination of “all marketing peeps for their continued insistence on trying to find a way to control/monetise the social media movement” and Wolf’s nomination of “everyone on Twitter that [sic] kept reposting the #fixreplies even after twitter did… you all look like a bunch of whining idiots now” (28%).

Visually, “everyone on twitter” was represented by a social network diagram and, in our usual tasteful way, “all marketing peeps” by a tapeworm.

I particularly like the tapeworm, don’t you?

Meanwhile, congratulations to Wolf, who won a t-shirt from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing — and a big raspberry to Gedulous who would’ve won if he were watching the program when his name was drawn from the Cocktail Shaker of Integrity but he wasn’t so we had a redraw and Wolf won instead so there nyer.

The Stilgherrian Live Eurovision Special is tonight from 7.15pm Sydney time, with special guests Nick Hodge, Snarky Platypus and probably Mark Pesce.

The regular old Stilgherrian Live will return at 9.30pm next Thursday night.