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.

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.

I’ve been taking time out across the Easter weekend to ponder my future. As part of that, I’ve started collecting other people’s impressions of me.

There’s three key issues. One, I need to simplify the massive range of media projects I’m doing or have dreamed up, and cut them back to what’s actually possible to achieve. Two, I have to find the right balance between income-generating media projects, purely playful or “public service” media projects which don’t earn money, and perhaps still a few geek-related things which do pay well. Three, how to reach this state of nirvana without pissing off clients or screwing up my cashflows.

Tricky, eh?

Anyway, more on that anon.

Thanks to that Internet thing, I’ve found a few curious descriptions of me already. Can you provide any others?

These are all much better than what it says on About Stilgherrian, “a Sydney-based consultant working at the intersection of the Internet, media and information technology”.

• “Perhaps one of Australia’s best tech writers”, Duncan Riley.
• “Known to some as the Rove [McManus] of the Streaming Web”, Matthew Hodgson.
• “The Bert Newton of Aussie social media”, @paininthenet.
• One of “Australia’s most interesting Twitter users”, a “fiercely opinionated blogger and former broadcaster”, news.com.au.
• “Always charming & erudite”, Kate Carruthers, though Peter Black disagreed, claiming “‘offensive or provocative’ is a better fit”.
• “Serial pest”, Verity Pravda.
• “God amongst men”, Laurel Papworth

I don’t consider myself a “journalist”, but have sometimes used “writer”. I’ve never liked the word “blogger”. And none of those things really describe the full gamut of what I do anyway. But then, as I say, maybe the gamut is too wide.

So, what other descriptions of me can you remember seeing? How would you explain me to your friends?

[Photo: Stilgherrian photographed at Kelly's On King by Miss Wired.]

There’s lots and lots of good material to read here, but I don’t want it to dominate my home page so they’re all over the jump.

• Famous Twits: 50 Celebrities on Twitter | Laurel Papworth: If you’re after “famous people” on Twitter, here’s a good a list as any to start with.
• When Aeroflot Passengers Rejected Their Pilot | Moscow Times: The pilot was drunk. Aeroflot’s reaction? “Meh. He only has to press a button. No problem.” You can’t make this stuff up!
• Facebook, MySpace drive mobile web use | News.com.au: A survey of 500 people by Sweeney Research has shown 31% of Australians access the web via their mobile phone handset. Or, if you prefer, more than two-thirds still don’t.
• P J O’Rourke: How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink: A classic O’Rourke rant from 1986.
• 2nd Annual PR & New Media Summit 2009: There’s a bunch of familiar names presenting at this conference on 3 to 4 March. I doubt I’ll make this one, but you never know.
• Rich man, poor man: study shows body language can indicate socioeconomic status | Physorg.com: A new study in Psychological Science reveals that non-verbal cues can give away a person’s socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper SES backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants’ SES background, based on their body language.
• So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time | NYTimes.com: Why the iPhone app store and the Ocarina application in particular represent a whole new wave of software development.
• A Definition Of Piracy In The Digital Age | Link: I’d imagined that the use of the term “piracy” to cover copyright infringement was a recent invention of the music and movie industries. Not so. Rick Welykochy traces it back to 1906.
• Drugs ‘legal in 10 years’ claim | BBC News: The Chief Constable of North Wales reminds us (from just over a year ago) that prohibition doesn’t work. Half of all reported crime is about feeding a drug habit.
• Why telcos should fear Twitter | ZDNet Australia: The short answer is that Twitter can replace SMS with a far more flexible tool. And about time. Telcos have been charging the equivalent of $1 million per gigabyte to send an SMS. It’s a rort.
• How to troubleshoot the POP3 Connector in Windows Small Business Server 2003 | Microsoft: What it says. This article didn’t help me with today’s problem, but it will certainly come in useful.
• Ecstasy ‘no worse than horse riding’ | News.com.au: Professor David Nutt, chairman of the UK Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), is a scientist and can do the maths. “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates — indeed encourages — certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use.”
• Aussies OK pirated software for personal use | CRN Australia: A study commissioned by Microsoft found that almost half of Australians believe it’s OK to use pirated software for personal use. Many can’t tell the difference between genuine and illegal software.
• Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death Search Magazine: American satirist P j O’Rourke writes about his experience of being diagnosed with cancer.
• Your Vision for 2009 | GetUp! Campaign Actions: Political campaigning organisation GetUp! presents the results of its latest survey of members.
• So why is filtering a pointless exercise? | sirchriss: An education technologist outlines why trying to provide a filtered Internet is ultimately self-defeating.
• How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections | PBS MediaShift: Former ABC journalist Julie Posetti describes how her students used Twitter to cover Australian elections.
• Politics and Technology Forum: Campaigning Online | Microsoft Events: The second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum is in Canberra on 26 February. I’ll be liveblogging it on this website, and there’ll be a special Stilgherrian Live Road Trip on the way. Details soon. Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi, who’s run several (unsuccessful) Democrat US presidential campaigns, and speakers include Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner.
• Why Teens Don’t Twitter | A Meaningful Life: Marc Lehmann’s take on the reason for the (apparent) older demographic profile of Twitter users.
• Text, text, text | Inside Story: Is the energy, liveliness and to-the-pointness of text-messaging already history, asks Richard Johnstone in this article from October 2008.
• Liam Vickery’s Blog: Top Aussies On Twitter: Liam Vickery’s personal choices for the top Australian twitterers. I don’t know Liam, but have seen him about on Twitter.
• Forgive Us Our Debts | newmatilda.com: Is debt really all that bad? In this extract from her new book, Margaret Atwood measures the changing moral weight of debt.
• Entering the Mobile Ecosystem | Silicon Federation: "Would you like to put your brand on a device that customers can't be without, a device they reach for many times a day?" A seminar on creating an iPhone app for your business.
• Spot the difference? | middleclassgirl.com: Whatever happened to TV presenter Naomi Robson?
• Ten Tweets about Twitter | the [non]billable hour: Some rather good tips to getting your head around Twitter.
• Global recession – where did all the money go? | guardian.co.uk: This set of diagrams steps through the different kinds of money, showing why the global financial system is unstable and, effectively, a giant pyramid scheme.
• Of Time and Twitter | Woolly Days: Another nice overview of Twitter’s rise, with an emphasis on journalism. However I suspect that the story of an “all-Twitter newspaper” from Scotland is a hoax.
• Twitter journalism, beyond happenstance | Almighty Link: “When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, a few non-journalists used their investigative instincts and some basic Twitter tools to find details about the news and share it with the world.” This article is another exploring the boundaries of who is and isn’t “doing journalism”.
• More Silliness: Congressman Wants to Ban “Silent” Cell Phone Cameras | Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: There’s a push of sorts in the US to make all phone cameras make a sound when they take a photo. As Weinstein points out, there’s no evidence there’s actually a problem to address, there are many other kinds of camera smaller than phone cameras, and even phone cameras can shoot in video mode — where a continuous sound would ruin the audio recording.
• Twitter | The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry: Stephen Fry, who now has 88,000+ followers on Twitter and rising rapidly, explains how he uses Twitter at this incredibly high volume — and requests understanding and a bit of self-help.
• Virtual Assistant – Nicole Hammett Business Support: This website isn’t the most brilliant graphic design (it’s a bit generic), but it builds trust in the business for two simple reasons: It explains clearly what this person does, and the rate card says very clearly what it’ll cost. None of this vague “our rates are competitive” and then asking you for all of your contact details. The only real turn-off for me is the generic stock-photography image of a harried office worker (what value does that add?) when it’d be better to have a photo of Nicole herself.

John Birmingham has followed up his highly-successful Axis of Time trilogy of military thrillers with another “ripper yarn” novel, Without Warning: America is Gone. It’s a good read, but not as good as it could be.

Like Axis of Time, which posited a 21st-century naval task force suddenly finding itself at the Battle of Midway and the final volume of which I reviewed earlier, Without Warning is alternative history. One the eve of the 2003 Iraq War, an unexplained energy field obliterates all human life across most of the United States. As the world realises the last remaining superpower is gone, the novel tracks the political and military conflicts which emerge through the eyes of characters ranging from a US general at Guantanamo Bay to a female assassin working undercover in France.

My perceptions of Without Warning are coloured by Katie Harris’ comment that my recent Gonzo Twitter effort was like Hemingway. I still haven’t read any Hemingway, but I’ve been thinking about writing styles. In a previous review I described William Gibson’s noir prose as “a richly textured cabernet merlot” in comparison with the “slab of VB” simplicity of Adrian d’Hagé’s action thriller. Birmingham’s writing is another slab of VB. It’s a fast, easy read without too many difficult words or complex metaphors to slow you down.

Of course there’s plenty of military and other boy’s toys brand names and train-spotter facts.

Lee… opened the throttles on the big boat’s massive Caterpillar engines, unleashing a stampede from the 1492 horsepower contained in each one…

Three identified shooters there. All white males, dressed casually, armed with FAMAS G2 assault rifles…

She opened the oversized hold-all and pulled out the artillery. The pistol-grip Benelli shotgun came first: customised 12-gauge, extended mag with a side-saddle shell carrier. Next was the deal closer, a specially cut-down Heckler & Koch UMP .45, with an extended box mag housing thirty rounds of .40-calibre Smith & Wesson goodness. She slung the HK over her shoulder. It was a large, excessive arsenal for just one young lady to haul around…

Yeah, I know. Chicks with guns are hawt, and there’s plenty to keep the lads moist. Who’ll be cast for the movie, I wonder?

Occasionally I was forced to look up some piece of military jargon or other to grasp the sense of a scene. Irritating to me, but Birmingham’s fans would reckon that just brands me a n00b.

I agree with the estimable Duncan Riley’s review too (interestingly the first Google hit for the book after the Amazon listing):

The French stream, except nearly right at the end of the novel, was perhaps the worst character development ever delivered by Birmingham…

The ending wasn’t great, and set the story up for a sequel which Birmingham is already talking about writing. It’s a BIG book for a Birmingham novel, and an awful lot to cover, and the need to flip ahead into the future is understandable, but it didn’t conclude strongly.

Still, it is what it is. A thrill for the fans. They won’t be disappointed.

Don’t get annoyed by the about-the-author blurb though.

John Birmingham refuses to build a website, but he has three blogs…

Um, and what is a blog if not a website? Fuckwits.

I’m well pleased that my rant for Crikey about journalists elicited a witty response from Jonathan Este, the journos’ “union thug”. He’s kindly allowed me to republish it in full below. My comments afterwards.

He’d also like me to draw your attention to the MEAA’s own project, The Future of Journalism, done in conjunction with The Walkley Foundation.

Bloggers: the biggest whingers since journalists

Jonathan Este writes:

Your blogging correspondent, Stilgherrian, seemed like such a nice bloke at the Future of Media Summit in Sydney on Tuesday. On the way from the venue to the pub afterwards we shared a few yarns and war stories and I bought him a beer.

He could have been a real journalist.

But his piece in yesterday’s Crikey [local copy] betrayed his outsider status in his very first par:

What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit… it’s endless bl–dy whingeing.

Whingeing, old son, is the past, the present and the future of journalism, as you’d know if you’d spent much time in the newsroom. It’s what we do. Journalists love whingeing and we’re pretty damn good at it.

But to judge by the wrangling during the Future of Journalism panel, on which I sat alongside Jane Shultze of The Australian, APN’s Hugh Martin and Professor Stephen Quinn of Curtin University, bloggers are certainly catching journalists up when it comes to the culture of complaint.

Their complaint appears to be this: “Journalists don’t take us seriously enough. They won’t let us play in their sand pit.”

Much debate raged about how to define journalism and journalists. Shultze copped a barracking for insisting that, as far as she was concerned, being a journalist had involved getting to know a beat (in her case, media business) extremely thoroughly, building a list of contacts around that beat and using it to break stories in the newspaper and — lately — online.

(With the greatest respect to a former colleague, I take exception with this, as it appears limited to reporters. To me a journalist is engaged in any or all aspects of journalism, there is just as much of the craft — yes, craft — of journalism in finessing a story for publication and the other roles involved in the production of a newspaper or bulletin as there is in reporting, but that’s another issue.)

Shultze’s definition was greeted by a howl of protest from the bloggers’ brigade: What do you think bloggers do? We break stories as well! What we do is just as valid as what you do, etc, etc.

And they are absolutely right. The best in the blogosphere are right up there with the best journalists, while there can be no doubt that some journalists practise the craft with more talent and diligence than others (you know who you are).

One of my favourite media stories this week is the Pounds 30 million purchase of ContentNext, the tech blog group, by Guardian News & Media. I’m a big fan of GNM and their online strategy as it is optimistic and aggressive. They are forging ahead into new markets in the belief that “reach will equal revenue” down the track.

And ContentNext has a high net worth readership in India of which the Grauniad wants a piece. GNM is not falling into the trap some other media organisations are in of circling their wagons, putting their fingers in their ears, singing “la-la-la” and hoping it’ll all go away if they cut staff savagely enough.

Perhaps Rafat Ali, the brain behind ContentNext, is technically a blogger, but what he and his people are engaged in is high-quality journalism. It is finding things out and keeping their market informed. So, can bloggers do journalism? Absolutely.

Stilgherrian reminds us of our faults and, yes: you do read barely altered press releases, there are sloppy errors and bias has been known to creep in, from time to time. One of the most recent comments you read about falling newspaper readership is: “If they gave us something worth reading, we’d buy their newspapers.”

So, less people are buying newspapers and more people are reading blogs and getting their news through informal social networks. As long as they still want the news, then there will be work for those of us whose job it is to find things out, whether it be by old-fashioned door-knocking, by monitoring Twitter feeds or by crowd sourcing. And we all get to share in the wonderful new online tools being developed.

So, yes, Stilgherrian, you can play in our sandpit. And we’ll be duly impressed when you come up with something better than the castles in the air you built yesterday.

Jonathan Este is the director of communications with the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance. His views are not necessarily those of the Alliance.

Stilgherrian’s Reaction

I think this is a superb response. But Jonathan, I think you’re slightly wrong about the nature of the bloggers’ complaint.

The complaint is, I believe, that bloggers are sick of being lumped together as an undifferentiated mass of amateur irrelevance while (some) journalists spout about the superiority of their craft — when both crafts cover the full spectrum from excellence to shite.

Jane Schultze was the worst offender on the panel in this regard — but she didn’t help things with her overly-narrow definition of journalism.

The bloggers feel, I believe, that if journalists don’t know about this spectrum then they’re only showing their ignorance, and that it’s a bit precious to gloss over the obvious failings of many members of their own profession.

Maybe the very term “blog” is the problem, because we’re using it for both the tool and the role. The tools for blogging did indeed emerge to serve the keepers of diaries full of trivia, but were soon co-opted by news organisations and others for more serious purposes.

To lump all users of blogging tools together as “bloggers” is like lumping journalists with historians, novelists and scientists and calling them “typists”.

Other Reactions

Duncan Riley, editor of The Inquisitr, emailed me:

What delicious irony from Jonathan Este in his contribution to the bloggers vs journalism debate (Crikey June 17), when as a journalist he has failed to use the correct name of the blog network acquired by the Guardian last week three times in as many paragraphs. The company acquired was ContentNext, not FirstContent, and its main blog is paidContent (they publish no title by the name of FirstContent). Bonus points to Jonathan on the acquisition price, which was $30m US not 30m pounds.

Would it be churlish for me to also mention that, um, Jonathan, we met on Tuesday, not Wednesday? Ah, fact-checking…

Did people really think I’d end up brawling with Jason Calacanis at CeBIT last week? Sure, I called him a prick and wrote about the evil cult of the Internet start-up. But he does actually have good points.

I met Mr Calacanis when I found myself recording the 2 Web Crew podcast on my borrowed video camera. Since I was concentrating on getting good audio, the vision’s a bit shaky, but at least you’ll see what it was like during those hectic 16 minutes.

I may disagree with Calacanis’ priorities in life, but that’s hardly unique to him. He does do business transparently, however. He makes sense and calls a spade a spade. And he’s certainly been a successful entrepreneur.

He’s also a tireless promoter — of himself. Now that’s not a bad thing when you’re trying to build hype around a new business. But it’s a character trait that Australians reckon is bad — which is perhaps why we so often fail to market our own innovations.

I was also amused to see the swarm of Calacanis fan-boys and girls buzzing around him “like flies to a dead sheep”, as I said on Twitter. Guys, a little less cult of personality and a little more independent thought will work wonders in your lives. Success is not achieved through frottage with the successful. Unless you’re a hooker.

So, Jason, here is the promised blog post saying that you’re not as much of a prick as I thought you were.

[Note: This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for Crikey this morning. The main difference is a bit more linkage. There's more CeBIT / Transaction 2.0 material to come.]

In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave. Following the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, he said, we’re now experiencing the Third Wave, or what might be called post-industrial society. Australia’s surfing prowess means nothing here, though. We’re still pissing in the shallows, barely held up by leaking floaties.

Why is tech-literate, well-educated Australia so bad at marketing and profiting from its own innovation, from the fisheye lens to gene shears? We do innovate, you know.

“Australians expect the government to do everything for them — but the government’s clueless,” explained journalist and evangelist Duncan Riley at yesterday’s Transaction 2.0 conference. “The Australia 2020 Summit is a classic example. The Internet was seen as an ‘emerging’ industry. Emerging? We’ve had it for 20 years! In the US alone it employs 7 million people.”

Riley, a one-time Howard government staffer, has successfully created his own internet start-ups. Until recently he wrote for Web 2.0 bible TechCrunch. Now he runs The Inquisitr.

“Why would you invest in some Internet business when there’s no tax advantage?” he asks. “If you want to make a movie you get tax benefits. If I had a farm I’d be a millionaire by now, there’s so many special benefits.”

Riley isn’t impressed with Australia’s broadband plans: a 12Mb/sec network by 2012 when, as Crikey has reported, others already do 100Mb/sec. “We’re still stuck in the dark ages,” he says. “Once we get this always-on culture, once we get the iPhone next month we’ll finally, hopefully, get unlimited data plans, Dear God!”

Compare Australia to Israel…

With a third of the population, Israel generates 10 times as many start-ups. “Israel is the second largest contributor of companies to NASDAQ after the US,” says Israeli-born Gilad Greenbaum, Director of IT for conference organisers Hannover Fairs Australia. “In the Tel Aviv – Herzelya – Natalia triangle alone [with a population the same as Adelaide] there are 3000 technology companies.” They’re not supporting the boom. They’re 3000 businesses with their own tech to sell.

Riley is frustrated at Australian businesses’ ignorance — even those attending Sydney’s massive CeBIT trade show. “I walked out there today and said ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Google Docs’ and people just stared at me blankly.”

Meanwhile watch out for GoodBarry and their everything-for-business-online service. Winning “Best Aussie Business 2.0 Start-Up” yesterday, they’ve just opened an office in San Fran and were last seen talking to venture capitalist Jason Calacanis. An American.

[Disclosure: I attended CeBIT and Transaction 2.0 as a guest of Hannover Fairs Australia.]

“I supposed at least he was honest,” said Duncan Riley when he passed on this story (pictured).

I’ll reproduce the text here so the search engines find it — which may or may not be a Good Thing. My website ends up in enough weird searches as it is.

Burglary

A 38-year-old Cole Avenue man reported that his home was invaded on Sept. 9. The man said that he was sitting home alone masturbating and watching a pornographic movie when a man came down into the basement, holding a gun, and started to videotape him. The man said that before he left, the intruder fed his dog some mushrooms and the dog died.

The story is supposedly from The Beacon Journal, Sunday 21 September 2003. If it’s a fake, someone’s gone to a lot of trouble.

Now, is this the weirdest crime story you’ve heard recently? Please, links to even weirder ones!

OK, that’s set the tone for the day…

I’m still chuckling at the seriousness with which some people treat getting onto Techmeme. It’s true, I keep stopping typing to giggle. It’s embarrassing.

I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

The Cult of the Internet Start-up

Attracting attention and scoring pageviews is very, very important to these guys — and for good reason. They’re fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Internet Start-up. They must generate The Buzz.

Let us now read from their gospel…

… 19 Soon, our Labours will have produced The Beta. We shall ready ourselves to supplicate Our Great Saviour the Venture Capitalist. 20 He shall ask, “Doth thy Beta have The Buzz?” 21 If it does have The Buzz, He will see that It is Good, and He shall writeth The Cheque. 22 And there shall be much rejoicing.

23 And then cometh the Second Phase wherein — praise be to The Great Saviour! — we shall write the IPO. 24 If we still have The Buzz, the Shares shall Rise, and the land will overfloweth with milk and honey. 25 And there shall be much rejoicing…

Internet Start-upers are fundamentalists. Anyone who doesn’t follow their pathway of monomaniacal self-sacrifice (read: high-risk workaholism) in pursuit of the Nirvana of the successful IPO is branded a Slacker, even by The Prophet.

The Cultists truly believe that the faster-faster-VC-to-IPO chase to these glorious riches is the right and proper thing to do — and like all zealots, they think the ends justify the means.

Note also Bill Moore’s comment. “A few million (or 10s of millions, max) dollars a year” and being “very comfortable” isn’t enough for him. He talks a bit about “industry changing”, but soon gets back to the money, complaining if he’d get “only” 15% of $100M.

That’s 15 million dollars, Bill!

There’s a word to describe that.

Greed.

If you’re on an average US, Australian or European wage, you’re already richer than 99% of the planet. But forget the top 1%. Even being in the top 0.01% isn’t enough, it seems. And anyone who isn’t this filthy greedy, anyone who isn’t prepared to treat people as disposable, exploitable objects along the way, is a “wimp” or a “wannabe”.

“There’s a Pig Loose in the Mosque! Sooooooooooooeeeeee!”

This discussion is heated because we’re not talking about subtly different ways of doing business here. We’re challenging the Cult’s core tenets. That greed is good. That the ideal is to grow fast and cash out, not build something of lasting value. That it’s just fine to burn people out along the way — collateral damage, I guess. That it doesn’t matter if your life is totally out of balance now because it’ll all sort itself out later.

Magically.

Somehow.

A few years ago I was discussing a couple of Internet start-up concepts with a well-respected VC-savvy adviser who paused and said:

You do realise you’ll be doing business with evil people? They don’t care about anything other than the return on their investment. As long as you deliver that, it’s fine. Just remember, though, they are evil.

The Cult of the Internet Start-up is evil. It’s selfish. It’s inhuman It’s amoral. Using the term “work ethic” to describe driving (or seducing) people into appallingly long work hours to the neglect of family and community and even self is disgusting.

This “grow now, worry about the consequences later” attitude is precisely the greedy, short-term thinking which has driven the world to the edge of an environmental disaster. But who cares, eh? You got your $100M — all of it! Leave someone else to clear up that mess, and plough on to the next “world-changing idea”.

Assuming you don’t die of a heart attack first.

Assuming you have a heart.

Calacanis’ original post exhibited the language of exploitation. Petty bean-counting to suck every last productive hour out of the meat-assets. He changed that wording quick smart, eh? But did he change his attitude?

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington did a beautifully-written follow-up — though really the message was standard advice for any business: (1) hire the right people, and (2) don’t waste money, but avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Some of Calacanis’ points were probably written in haste, like his statement “Fire people who are not workaholics” (he later changed it to “Fire people who don’t love their work”). Others were not controversial, like his advice to “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.” Overall, I get the impression that if he had spent just a few minutes editing his post, he would have had a 100% different reaction from readers.

Agreed. The reaction wouldn’t have been as sharp. But changing the surface PR spin is just spraying perfume to cover the underlying stench.

Arrington exhibits the same exploitative signs in a later comment.

“And I totally agree with you that for x duration you can work someone to death but the person needs to understand what happens once x duration is completed. There has to be downtime.”

No, they don’t need to understand that. Think of them as a goldfish. Goldfish will eat everything you give them until their little stomachs explode (or so I hear). The key isn’t to find a goldfish that knows when to stop eating. They key is to know when to stop feeding the goldfish, for their own good.

Once again, it’s about treating your staff as objects to be manipulated at your whim. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

“If you’re not like us, you’re a loser”

This is not the only way of starting a new business. It’s just one specific model — about fast growth and high risk. Without a doubt, it can sometimes produce astounding results. It can also crash spectacularly, leaving no survivors.

You can also build a business calmly, rationally, with solid foundations — and with respect for the people and world around you. A business which can weather the storms because the captain has a clear view from the bridge, accurate maps and a firm hand on the wheel — as well as a dedicated crew, of course.

Calacanis has been more measured since he encountered the criticism of his original post, but he’s still condescending when comparing the fundamentalist Cult approach to the truly enlightened 37signals.

You haven’t raised tons of money and you’re building a “lifestyle” business from what I gather (correct?) You’re not trying to displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. You’re not trying to build a service that gets to 100M monthly users, and you’re not on some aggressive timeline. You’re trying to build something that you enjoy working on and that helps people… correct?

When you take VC money and try to compete in a really aggressive space like search/research you’re faced with folks like Google, Wikipedia, about.com, Yahoo, eHow, DMOZ , etc. These are big companies with lots of resources… the way you beat them is to zig where they zag and/or out hustle them. So, if you want to compete in that space you’re gonna need to really work hard — you’re not going to do it working a four hour work week that’s for sure!

I’ll gloss over the fact that one of his differentiators is that 37signals is trying to build something “that helps people”, compared to his megalomaniacal goal of “displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc”. 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson quite rightly takes exception to all this.

[W]e’re not building a “lifestyle” business. We’re just building a business. To take the sound bytes [sic] from the recent Wired article, a multimillion dollar one that doubled in revenues last year…

So please don’t make the choices we’ve made about treating our employees one of a “lifestyle” (aka “small timer”, “toy”) vs “real” business. That somehow only those happy hippies who are not going for the gold can afford to hire whole people with a life outside of work. That’s bullcrap.

I very much do believe, though, that taking VC money with loads of strings attached will put hard pressures and increased stress on the decision making. And that in turn can lead to a culture where long hours and no walking outside for coffee can be seen as good, patriotic practices.

What I take the most offence to, though, is the dichotomist split between the workaholic go-getters who gets the quick cash and the lame waiting-in-line nine-to-fivers who get a gold watch after 30 years. What a crock.

We launched Basecamp four years ago. We built it off a 10 hour/week technical time budget. It’s very possible to build a “real”, multimillion dollar business that has high growth without resorting to the workaholic path.

Mr Calacanis, failing to comprehend that there are paths other than your own is fundamentalism. Even when you pretend to accept that there are alternatives — but still wrap your words in condescension.

Cult Myth #1: “It’s OK, I choose to work this way”

No it’s not OK. If you’re immersed in one specific highly-focussed environment for almost your entire waking life, then your decisions will not be made with a sense of perspective. You are not what DHH calls “a whole person”.

Vast slabs of the social fabric which informs good long-term, ethical decisions simply won’t be on your radar.

And then there’s the guys who say, “Well, I can work 16 hours a day for 7 days a week and it doesn’t do me any harm.” Well bully for you. I bet your dick’s bigger than mine too, eh? This isn’t a contest to see who’s the biggest martyr. It’s about who can achieve the most, not suffer the most.

Remember, Patty Hearst was there “voluntarily” too.

Cult Myth #2: “This is what makes America great”

This is the most toxic myth of all — wrapping your obsession in the flag.

No, this attitude is what makes America look like it’s populated by arseholes. Ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, self-centred arseholes who consume everything in sight and dump their crap on the rest of the world under the delusion that their way is the best and only way. A nation that only now is starting to realise the mess it’s in.

What actually made America great — past tense — was the visionary foresight of its founders, the political geniuses who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At the time they knew they were creating some special — not just for the moment, but for all time.

God Bless America.

She’d better, because a clear-headed America will be needed to help face the challenges of the future — the very near future. And an America retreating into medievalism and stubborn arrogance is not what the world needs.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, this is why I refer to Jason Calacanis as a prick. His ill-thought-out wording in an essay intended to convey good advice — and some of it is good advice, let’s not forget! — exposed this smelly underlying attitude of winner-take-all exploitation and devil take the hindmost.

I strongly believe this to be a dangerous, toxic, anti-human attitude and it’s infecting others. It must be fought vigorously and with passion.

Calacanis and his defenders reckon that workaholic exploitation is the only way to “change the world”. It’s not. There’s also clarity of vision, a really good idea, and well-planned execution. It’s the difference between beating one’s opponent with serried ranks of massed foot-soldiers, or using snipers.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/religion/john_calacanis_evil_cult/feed/ 22 http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/ http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 05:27:23 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/ A note for folks stumbling across this website thanks to the Jason Calacanis / 37signals / TechCrunch discussion: It’s 4.30pm on a sunny autumn Sunday afternoon here in Sydney. I have been writing a further post which explains, amongst other things, that I’m not trolling (deliberately stirring up controversy), but passionately arguing a genuine concern. I’m amused this has turned into a global controversy, flattered even, when I reckon it’s more a storm in a teacup — though at its heart is a fundamental issue about how we do business. However for the next few hours I’ll be enjoying the remaining sunshine, doing some shopping and generally spending Sunday evening with my beloved. More soon.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/feed/ 1 http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/ http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/#comments Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:54:30 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/ [Update 10 March, 1030 AEDT: I've written a follow-up article which, while bound to piss off a few people, explains precisely why I'm so concerned about this issue.]

…but I don’t know whether this was exactly what I had in mind. Calling a high-profile Internet entrepreneur a prick, and then being referenced by some of the highest-traffic tech blogs on the planet.

OK, I participated in the discussion at TechCrunch and the 37signals blog Signal vs Noise, as I should. But then it was picked up by Mashable and then TechMeme (see screenshot). And now I’m seeing inbound from TechCrunch Japan and Colbert Low’s technology blog and who knows where else to come.

Jason Calacanis has edited his original post in face of the fallout:

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it — go work at the post office or stabucks [sic] if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

He’s also posted an explanatory piece. My take on that: lots of good words, but in my experience the words that people blurt out first are closest to what they really believe.

If an employer can’t tell the difference between passion and being a workaholic, or if he blurts out critical policies without thinking about the language he’s using and how people might respond, then he’s a dangerous employer. Working the way Calicanis suggests has serious long-term health impacts, and in some places is illegal.

Should I have called Calacanis a “prick”?

I don’t see why not. I’d certainly call him that to his face, if we were discussing this issue. It’s my honest opinion. Sure, I know nothing about him except his writing today and the way he’s responding to the criticism. But hey, I figure both he and I have been in the public media space for a long time and we’re both used to worse.

However he wants to smudge it over after the fact, what Calicanis said was that he’d only employ people who work in conditions which are dangerous to their health. I’m certainly glad he doesn’t have kids, ‘cos he’d probably have them in the coal mines by age 5.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/feed/ 13 http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/treat_staff/ http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/treat_staff/#comments Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:50:08 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/treat_staff/ [Update 10 March, 1030 AEDT: I've written a follow-up article which, while bound to piss off a few people, explains precisely why I'm so concerned about this issue. There's also my first follow-up, written on the weekend.]

“Chalk and cheese” is how I’d describe two approaches to staff management I stumbled across this week. One treats staff as trusted contributors to a shared enterprise, the other as disposable work-droids from which you squeeze every last effort.

Jason Calacanis (pictured) has started various firms, including Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine”. (Don’t worry, I’d never heard of it either.) In How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips) there are some good tips — like outsourcing accounting and worrying more about good chairs than tables. But to paraphrase the bad ones:

• Hold meetings at lunchtime so people never get a mental break from work.
• Don’t provide phones so staff have to use their own.
• If someone shows signs of working hard, buy them a computer for home so they end up working nights and weekends too.
• Buy a good coffee machine — not because you’d like to give your employees good coffee, but to prevent them “wasting time” getting it from a nearby barista.

But that’s not the worst…

The worst one for me, and this is the precise quote:

• “Fire people who are not workaholics… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks [sic] if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

Can you imagine what it’d be like working for this guy? Do you think you’d get much loyalty in return for being a wage-slave?

As Duncan Riley says in TechCrunch, “Expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal. Up to 18 hours a day for $30-35,000 (what I’ve heard is the going rate for base Mahalo employees), you’re never allowed to go outside during this time or have a proper break.”

Compare that with the enlightened attitudes at 37signals, creators of truly innovative software which I use every day, like Basecamp and Highrise. They trust their staff!

Here’s the 3 workplace experiments they’ve just implemented:

• A 4-day working week. “People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs five days… Three-day weekends mean people come back extra refreshed on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people come back happier on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people actually work harder and more efficiently during the four-day work week.”
• They fund people’s passions. “We want our people to experience new things, discover new hobbies, and generally be interesting people. For example, Mark has recently taken up flight lessons. 37signals is helping him pay for those. If someone wants to take cooking lessons, we’ll help pay for those… Part of the deal is that if 37signals helps you pay, you have to share what you’ve learned with everyone. Not just everyone at 37signals, but everyone who reads our blog.”
• A corporate credit card for everyone, for whatever they want. “If you want a book or some software or you want to go to a conference, it’s on us. We just ask people to be reasonable with their spending. If there’s a problem, we’ll let the person know. We’d rather trust people to make reasonable spending decisions than assume people will abuse the privilege by default.”

37signals have responded to Calacanis’ post:

Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14-hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.
3. People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That’ll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it’ll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will “stay late” out of obligation, but not really be productive.
4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.
5. Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Precisely. Innovation is creative work. Happy employees are loyal employees — and they’ll put in those extra hours voluntarily when they’re really needed.

Mr Calacanis may have generated more dollars in a shorter time than 37signals — or maybe he hasn’t, I don’t know. But I know who I’d rather sit next to on a long flight. And I know who I’d invite to dinner or to share a beer.

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