Over a year after it was first published, my piece Super Hornets are Go has garnered an interesting new comment. I’m not sure I agree, but my response is there anyway. If you’d like to add to the discussion, do pop over and do so!
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Stilgherrian’s links for 03 March 2009 through 07 March 2009, containing traces of nuts:
- J-Startup News: Billing itself as the latest on journalism startups and new business models for news
- Twitter Nudes: “This art project is designed to reflect the diversity of Twitter through nude photos of users from around the world and is completely anonymous: even we won’t see who sent the picture.”
- The Week that Twitter Tipped | Fast Company: If 2009 is the year that Twitter becomes “mainstream”, then perhaps this is the week of that year.
- Pauline Hanson Today Tonight 01Mar09 | YouTube: From Monday night, the Today Tonight interview where independent political candidate Pauline Hanson, formerly of One Nation, spits the dummy when asked where her election funding went, exactly.
- Skittle Fisting: Memes spread in strange ways. This tasteless “Taste the Failbow” site appeared during the #skittlefisting event last weekend.
- Tell Me More About This Australian Thing Called Rooting | PodBlack Cat: Following the Twitter #fisting incident last weekend, someone ran it past a Doctor of Linguistics who specialises in taboo language.
- Infringement and Terrorism: Pfft! | Brendan Scott’s Weblog: Arguing against the logic in that RAND report about increasing penalties for copyright infringement. “Does anyone honestly believe that people who are actively planning to commit mass murder are going to be deterred by a jail sentence for copyright infringement?”
- Twitter Begins Rolling Out Search and Trends | ReadWriteWeb: The news story itself isn’t that exciting. It’s just that the random Twitter screenshot they used to illustrate the story contains a mention of me via @NickHodge. Yes, this is really low-grade ego surfing. Cope.
- Sky News appoints Twitter correspondent… | guardian.co.uk: Jemima Kiss' post makes a few excellent points about using Twitter in journalism, including the observation that a dedicated Twitter correspondent “rather misses the point, which is that Twitter should be a tool that any forward-thinking journalist tries out, learns and then incorporates into their news gathering.” Precisely.
- Robots | The Big Picture: 32 fine images of robots, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance.
- Taking out the trash | ZDNet Australia: Fake Stephen Conroy pays tribute to Clive Hamilton, amongst other things.
- What Are You Doing? (#Skittles) | WSJ.com: The Wall Street Journal’s rather staid blog post about the #skittlefisting phenomenon.
- Video: Jon Stewart explains Twitter (or tries to) | VentureBeat: Some Twitter users have criticised this as a lame attack, and it is. It confused some tweets being inane with all tweets being inane. But there’s a bittersweet moment towards the end where the “reporter” reminds Jon Stewart he’s not immune.
- Address to CeBIT Broadband Infrastructure Forum | Senator Stephen Conroy: The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is loose in Hannover.
- Social Marketing Bullshit Bingo | raena.net: Need buzzword bingo cards for the next Web 2.0 wankfest? Here you go…
- Organized Crime Is Increasingly Active in Film Piracy; Three Cases Link Terrorists to Piracy Profits | RAND: What the headline doesn’t say is that two of the three cases are well and truly in the past, and that the report was “supported by a grant from the Motion Picture Association” with the express aim of investigating the link. Naturally enough, they found one, and the media release provides the spin.
- Lily Allen talks Twitter on ROVE (Australia) | YouTube: Rove’s interview with Lily Allen which led to around 1600 Australians joining Twitter in a couple hours.
Given that mere popularity doesn’t reflect quality, here’s my personal selection of my best, timeless posts for 2008. Happy reading!
- Kruddiversary: The internet thanks you for 12 months of achieving nothing, my Crikey article looking at the first year of the Rudd government from an Internet geek’s perspective.
- Thailand’s political crisis: an introduction, though later pieces in The Economist are better than my amateur efforts.
- Journalism in a hyperconnected world.
- @KevinRuddPM stumbles into the Twitterverse, a Crikey article which includes links to the previous three essays I’d written about the PM’s entrance into modern social media.
- Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown, my experiment in live-tweeting a descriptive essay and still one of the best things I’ve written all year.
- How Dell fixed my monitor order, which is being used by clever consultants as an example of how to use social media for quality customer service.
- Sunday Thoughts about Journalism, a rather lengthy essay with many links to background on the Death of Newspapers this year.
- Finally, The Shave, a rather wonderful film we made.
- The Great Firewall of China: how it works, how to bypass it.
- Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu! This piece triggered an entire wave of discussion and was quoted globally.
- Winter Solstice Meditation.
- Anzac Day Rememberings.
- ABC Playback: so this is the future of television…? Nope! A review of what’s now called ABC iView.
- There ain’t no shortcuts to professionally-managed IT.
- Remembering the Space Age: Arthur C Clarke dead at 90.
- Super Hornets are Go.
- Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up. I don’t really think Jason is evil, but I do worry about the self-centred anti-human attitude of many people connected with Internet start-ups.
- New national anthem: I am So an Aussie, when the Snarky Platypus and I created, yes, a new national anthem. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!
- Is it really so wrong to mix business and politics (and religion)?
- Leaving room for elephants: a chat with David Attenborough, a personal fave since it harks back to an interesting time in my life. This is still one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve done. Ever.
- Angry geeks: “Don’t waste money on internet filters”, one of many articles I posted about censorship, but which outlined the key issues way back in January.
- Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.
Thailand’s long-simmering political crisis finally made it onto Western TVs this week when protesters closed Bangkok’s international airport, disrupting [shock horror] Western tourists.
The essence is that the People’s Alliance for Democracy, the guys in the yellow shirts who’ve shut down the airport, want prime minister Somchai Wongsawat (สมชาย วงศ์สวัสดิ์) to resign. They reckon he’s the puppet of a former corrupt prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.
You could argue that Somchai’s election, while controversial, was constitutionally valid. But PAD has run out of patience with the string of corrupt and presumed-corrupt politicians. Even the army chief reckons it might be time to call fresh elections to clear the air. But Somchai won’t budge.
This isn’t a simple story of The People versus the Evil Politician though. The roots of conflict go deep into Thai history and culture.
Stilgherrian’s links for 23 August 2008 through 24 August 2008, with shaved parmesan:
- Medals per mil. Population by Country | Swivel: Sean Carmody continues his data mining on the Beijing Olympics that discover that the Bahamas is the highest medal winner per capita, followed by Jamaica, Slovenia, Australia and New Zealand.
- Ohio Voting Machines Contained Programming Error That Dropped Votes | washingtonpost.com: “A voting system used in 34 [US] states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.” Yet another argument against computer-based voting.
Given the recent rants about journalism and journalistic standards [mine and Jonathan Este's], Anna Warwick’s current blog entry at news.com.au is particularly apropos.
In her post Lost my designer sunnies, Ms Warwick (pictured) relates how she acted when she had to pay $14 for a glass of wine at an up-market city bar.
“I’m a journalist, I can’t afford this!” I said, hoping they might become afraid of bad publicity and offer me a freebie. Obviously I wasn’t at all scary. Joe ushered me out as soon as we’d finished our round.
As commenter Nikky of Sydney pointed out:
And they wonder why journalists in traditional media think blogging isn’t journalism… Saying that you’re a “journalist” and hoping to get a freebie at a bar is just disgraceful. Check the code of ethics, Anna. If you can’t afford a $14 glass of wine, then you might need to drink where all the other journos drink on their own dime, or invite yourself shamelessly along to a publicity event, instead of trying to pressure poor bar staff into giving you free hospitality.
Now there are only two alternatives here. Either Ms Warwick is a journalist — and her butterfly-infested personal website mentions roles such as “managing editor” — so using that status to scam a freebie is unethical. Or she’s not a journalist, which means she was lying.
Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon has announced that the controversial purchase of 24 Super Hornet aircraft will go ahead.
The review of the Howard government’s decision to buy the aircraft — at a total cost of $6 billion even though the RAAF hadn’t wanted them — reached some damaging conclusions, including:
- There has been a lack of sound, long-term air combat capability planning decisions by the former Government over the course of the last decade.
- The retirement of the F-111 was made in haste but is not irreversible. The cost of turning the F-111 back on would be enormous and crews and skills have already moved on.
- The former Government’s decision to leave Australia’s air defences in the hands of the Joint Strike Fighter project was a flawed leap of faith in scheduling terms and combined with the quick decision to retire the F-111 early, allowed an air combat capability gap to emerge.
- The subsequent timetable the former Government put on the acquisition of an interim fighter left Defence planners with no choice but to recommend the Super Hornet. No other suitable aircraft could be produced to meet the 2010 deadline the former Government had set. One year on, that is now even more so the case.
Cancelling the order would still incur a financial penalty and create “undesirable tensions”, and the final conclusions is that “the Super Hornet is an excellent aircraft… and is the only aircraft which can meet the small delivery window created by the former Government’s poor planning processes and politically-driven responses.”
As a shareholder in Australia Inc, I’d like to know why the former “board members” allowed this to happen. When company directors are negligent they become personally liable so why, given the report’s damning conclusions, does Brendan Nelson not become personally liable?
Perhaps my Prediction number 6 for 2008 won’t come true. The wife of former Thai president Thaksin Shinawatra, returned to Bangkok yesterday and was immediately taken to the Supreme Court to face corruption charges. Pojaman Shinawatra, 51, was charged with using her husband’s influence to buy real estate at one-third its value. She was released on bail of 5 million baht ($171,400) and ordered not to leave the country.
I think it’s good that Australia is the third least likely country to bribe someone, following such excellent company as Switzerland and Norway.
Can’t put up billboards in a park? No problem! Just say they’re “set dressing” and you’re making a TV commercial — even if you’re not. That’s precisely what Audi did in Toronto to advertise the new Audi TT.
Audi got permits from the Film and Television Office of Toronto to shoot a commercial that would allow it to place 2-metre high double “T” statues all over the city. Except there was no TV commercial…
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